Josh Peck Left Drake & Josh Behind One Supporting Role at a Time

Josh Peck

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 10, 1986 New York City, New York, USA
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Oppenheimer, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Awards	Independent Spirit (shared)

The sitcom that made Josh Peck famous still airs somewhere every night, and it has never sent him a residual check. Peck laid out the numbers on a personal-finance podcast: about $900,000 across the run of Drake & Josh, roughly half of it gone to agents, managers and taxes, and nothing at all once the cameras stopped. Nickelodeon, he explained, was the only room in town for a teenage comic. Nobody bargains hard with the only room.

Read his career through that ledger and the choices stop looking random. The fretful, rule-following half of a children’s double act became a voice actor, a network sitcom lead, a vlogger with more than three million subscribers and, approaching forty, a character actor whom Christopher Nolan and HBO hire for a scene or two at a time. None of it asked audiences to forget Josh Nichols, and most of it paid better than he ever did.

His mother, Barbara, raised him in Manhattan with help from her own mother; his father, a married coworker of hers, never entered the picture, and Peck never met him. The asthmatic, heavy kid who arrived on November 10, 1986, found what he was good at early. He did stand-up at Carolines on Broadway as a boy, which led to a spot on The Rosie O’Donnell Show and then to the Professional Performing Arts School.

Comedy is how Nickelodeon found him. He joined the sketch ensemble of The Amanda Show at about $3,000 an episode, by his own account, and the network then built Drake & Josh around him and Drake Bell as mismatched stepbrothers, a premise that ran four seasons and two television films. In the same stretch he played George, the overweight bully a group of boys lure onto a river, in Jacob Aaron Estes’s Mean Creek, a small, unforgiving film whose cast and filmmakers shared a special distinction award at the Independent Spirit Awards. Two careers, one teenager.

The Peck who appeared in the sitcom’s final season was visibly thinner. He lost the weight during the third season, the same stretch in which he was struggling with alcohol and drugs, a period he later took apart in his memoir, Happy People Are Annoying. He got sober in 2008, at 21, the year he played Luke Shapiro, a teenage pot dealer in the Manhattan of 1994, opposite Ben Kingsley in Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness. The film took the audience award at Sundance and seemed to promise an adult career. That career arrived slowly.

What came first was steady, unglamorous work. From the second Ice Age film onward he voiced Eddie, one of the two opossum brothers, through the franchise’s sequels. On Nickelodeon’s animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles he was the vigilante Casey Jones, and in the Red Dawn remake he played Matt Eckert, younger brother of Chris Hemsworth‘s character. Fox paired him with John Stamos in Grandfathered, a comedy about a bachelor who discovers he has a son and a granddaughter. It lasted one season.

The more consequential move happened on a phone screen. Peck became a regular in David Dobrik’s vlogs and then launched his own YouTube channel, Shua Vlogs, built around his life with Paige O’Brien, whom he married in 2017. Podcasts followed, first Curious with Josh Peck and then Good Guys with the comedian Ben Soffer. It was a business he owned, and it rebuilt his standing with the audience that had grown up on his reruns.

That audience is also where the friction lives. The persona Peck sells online is relentlessly upbeat, the reformed kid star who did the work, and it sits awkwardly beside the history of the network that raised him. When the documentary series Quiet on Set aired in March 2024 and Drake Bell described being abused as a teenager by the dialogue coach Brian Peck, no relation, Josh Peck said nothing for several days, and the internet noticed. His statement, when it came, was careful: he had reached out to Bell privately, he wrote, and “children should be protected.” Bell asked fans to go easy on him. The episode showed the limits of a brand built on cheerfulness. The pay disclosure two years later read like a franker answer to the question the documentary had raised about what Nickelodeon cost the children on its screens.

The acting turned in the meantime, and it turned through supporting parts. Disney+ gave him the lead in its Turner & Hooch series, as the son of the detective Tom Hanks once played; it was cancelled after one season. Hulu cast him as Drew in How I Met Your Father. Then Nolan made him Kenneth Bainbridge, the physicist who directed the Trinity test, in Oppenheimer. In the second season of The Last of Us he opens the episode “Day One” as Janowitz, a FEDRA soldier telling a filthy story in the back of a van shortly before a grenade ends the conversation. He shot it in two days in Vancouver, and his insult-laden monologue went viral.

The current run is the busiest he has had in years. In Prime Video‘s Cross he plays Senator Pete Ashford, a son of privilege from the heartland who is out of his depth, a part he auditioned for after the casting director called; the second season premiered on February 11, 2026. In March he signed with the Gersh agency. On October 5, Food Network premiered Sweet Deceit, a competition he hosts in which teams hunt hyper-realistic cakes disguised as everyday objects in real locations, with up to $12,000 at stake; its first eight episodes run on a Halloween theme, and a holiday batch follows.

Peck and O’Brien have three sons, the youngest born in July 2025, and he talks about his sobriety plainly, in print and on his podcasts. The next date on his calendar is February 5, 2027, when Ice Age: Boiling Point brings Eddie back to cinemas. It is the role he has held longest, and the one in which audiences hear him without seeing the face Nickelodeon made famous.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer, the last of us, Josh Peck, Drake & Josh

Related People

Chuck Lorre

Dave Chappelle

Colin Jost

Jamie Foxx

Matt Reeves

Bob Odenkirk