Matt Berry, the most hired voice in comedy, still wants to be heard as a musician

Matt Berry

Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Boffy b assumed (based on copyright claims). / CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 2, 1974 Bromham, Bedfordshire, England
Occupation	Actor, comedian and musician
Known for	The Wild Robot, Moon, One Day
Awards	BAFTA

Matt Berry’s voice reaches a room before he does. It is a baritone that stretches vowels until they sound antique, leans on the wrong syllable with total conviction and can make a line about printer toner sound like a decree from a minor king. Studios hire it constantly: for a centuries-old vampire in What We Do in the Shadows, for a robot butler in Fallout, for the villain of Brad Bird‘s Ray Gunn, for the man who called presenters to the stage at the Academy Awards. The person attached to it has been described as shy and introverted, rarely discusses his private life and skips promotional events unless a contract obliges him. He also spends a striking share of his working life making records that sound nothing like the characters who pay for them.

That split goes back a long way. Matthew Charles Berry grew up in Bromham, a village outside Bedford, the son of a nurse and a taxi driver. His teachers discouraged the music he cared about most, and he was kept off the GCSE music course because he could not read sheet music. He kept playing anyway.

Born on 2 May 1974, Berry had self-released an album called Jackpot by the mid-1990s and graduated in contemporary arts from Nottingham Trent University in 1999. His first steady acting job was at the London Dungeon, playing Jack the Ripper and a judge for £178 a week. The real apprenticeship happened at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Islington, where he met Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, and through them a generation of British cult comedy. In Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace he played Todd Rivers, a vain actor cast as the heroic Dr Lucien Sanchez in a deliberately terrible horror series. In The Mighty Boosh he was the explorer Dixon Bainbridge. With Rich Fulcher he created Snuff Box for BBC Three, co-writing it and composing the theme and score himself.

Mainstream recognition came through a boss. Berry joined The IT Crowd as Douglas Reynholm, the heir who inherits a company he has no idea how to run, and turned a supporting part into the show’s loudest presence; it earned him a British Comedy Award nomination as best male newcomer. With Arthur Mathews, co-creator of Father Ted, he then wrote Toast of London for Channel 4, playing Steven Toast, a pompous stage actor who scrapes a living from voiceover sessions and is humiliated in every one of them. The series won him the BAFTA for male performance in a comedy programme in 2015, and Toast returned on BBC One in Toast of Tinseltown in 2022.

The role that carried him abroad was Laszlo Cravensworth, the libertine English vampire of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. Across six seasons and 61 episodes, between 2019 and the final run in 2024, Berry built Laszlo on improvisation and on deliberately mangled pronunciations that became the character’s signature. In 2024 he received the series’ first acting Emmy nomination, as lead actor in a comedy. In the same years he played a Victorian detective in Channel 4’s Year of the Rabbit, a show the channel renewed and then cancelled, citing pandemic budget cuts.

There is an awkward irony in all this. Toast of London was a satire of the voiceover trade, of an actor whose instrument is rented out by the hour to sell whatever is put in front of him. A decade later Berry is one of the most booked voices in the business: Moominpappa in Moominvalley, Prince Merkimer in Disenchantment, the droid 8D8 in The Book of Boba Fett, Mr. Handy in Fallout, Shlub in Krapopolis, the Nitwit in A Minecraft Movie, Sherlock Holmes in Watson. Several of those parts ask for the sound and little else, a register so recognisable it risks flattening into a brand. Shadows showed what he does with room to invent; a ten-second cameo built around his diction mostly shows that the diction sells.

The music is where he keeps control. On the Acid Jazz label he has released a long run of albums that cross psychedelic folk with library-music textures, among them Witchazel, Kill the Wolf, The Small Hours, Phantom Birds and The Blue Elephant. Heard Noises, released in 2025 with guests including Natasha Lyonne, reached number 22 on the UK albums chart, his highest placing. In October 2025 he played organ for Queens of the Stone Age at the Royal Albert Hall, and in June 2026 he went further from comedy than ever with Everything’s Peachy, an instrumental jazz suite recorded as the Matt Berry Trio with Phill Scragg and Graham Mann. He has also written the themes for his own series, Toast of London among them.

The current year has been his busiest on screen. In March 2026 he was the announcer of the 98th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, a booking the comedy site Chortle greeted by recalling how thoroughly Toast had mocked voiceover work. In May he appeared in the second season of Citadel on Prime Video as Frank Sharpe. He voices Mr. Bland in Duncan Jones‘s animated Rogue Trooper, which premiered at Annecy in June and screened at the BFI London Film Festival in October, and he is the lead villain, Francis ‘Slugsy’ Xavier, in Ray Gunn, which had its gala premiere at the same festival on 10 October and reaches Netflix on 18 December after a limited 70mm run in cinemas. Before that comes Warner Bros.‘ animated The Cat in the Hat, with Bill Hader as the Cat and Berry as the family’s fish, on 6 November.

Of his life away from work he says very little. In a 2017 interview he explained that he had left London for somewhere with more space and asked that it not be named, and his social media is given over almost entirely to his records and his projects.

Two franchise sequels sit on his slate, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 for March 2027 and A Minecraft Movie Squared for July 2027. The project that matters more is Force & Majeure, a six-part Sky comedy he co-created with Natasha Lyonne and Tom Scharpling, in which he plays Thomas Force, an art expert with a sideline in stealing art. It would put his face back at the centre of a series, on terms he helped write.

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Tags: actors, Natasha Lyonne, Ray Gunn, Matt Berry, Arthur Mathews, The IT Crowd

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