Matt Stone, the South Park co-creator who keeps choosing the hardest deadline

Matt Stone

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

Born	May 26, 1971 Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Animator, screenwriter and producer
Known for	South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Bowling for Columbine, Team America: World Police
Awards	Emmy · Peabody · 2 Tony Award · Grammy · Television Academy Hall of Fame

Ask anyone to picture the people behind South Park and Trey Parker usually comes to mind first: the director, the singer, the voice of Cartman. Matt Stone is the other half. He is Kyle, Kenny and Butters in the recording booth, the producer on everything the pair has made, and a much less familiar face. The split is too tidy. Stone could have stepped away from hard deadlines decades ago. Instead he keeps choosing a job in which a whole episode of television is written, animated and delivered in about six days, and keeps piling riskier projects on top.

He grew up in Littleton, a suburb of Denver, after being born in Houston, Texas, to Sheila Lois Belasco and Gerald Whitney Stone Jr., an economist. Their first names later went to Kyle’s parents, Gerald and Sheila Broflovski. As a teenager he played drums and loved Rush and The Police. His father, worried that his son would become “a musician and a bum”, pushed him toward something practical. At the University of Colorado Boulder the compromise was a double major in mathematics and film, and it was in the film classes that he met Parker.

Stone, born on May 26, 1971, graduated in 1993, the same year the pair’s student feature premiered in Boulder on Halloween night. With a cameo by their teacher, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Alferd Packer: The Musical was a singing western about a Colorado prospector convicted of eating his companions, with Stone in the cast. Troma bought the film in 1996, retitled it Cannibal! The Musical, and it became a cult favourite.

In Los Angeles, Stone has recalled sleeping on a pile of dirty laundry for about a year because he could not afford a mattress. The breakthrough came from a favour. In 1995 the executive Brian Graden paid them to make a video Christmas card, and The Spirit of Christmas ended up being copied, digitised into one of the first viral videos. Comedy Central ordered a series. South Park premiered in August 1997 and turned a small cable channel into a power almost overnight. Kyle Broflovski, the show’s moral conscience, is loosely modelled on Stone, Stone also voices Kenny’s muffled lines and Butters.

The early film years were a run of fights with the ratings board. Orgazmo, with Stone in the cast, was rated NC-17 and sank in 1997. He then co-starred with Parker in David Zucker’s BASEketball in 1998. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut only secured its R rating two weeks before release in 1999, then grossed 83 million dollars, and its song “Blame Canada”, written by Parker and Marc Shaiman, was nominated for the Oscar. The sitcom That’s My Bush! lasted a single season in 2001 at roughly a million dollars an episode. Team America: World Police, the 2004 marionette action spoof, worked on screen and nearly broke its makers. Stone called it “the worst time of my life – I never want to see a puppet again.”

The biggest leap came on Broadway. With Robert Lopez, the songwriter behind Avenue Q, Parker and Stone spent years building The Book of Mormon, which opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in March 2011. It won nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and Stone shares the prizes for the book and the score, along with a Grammy for the cast album. He has described the show as “an atheist’s love letter to religion”.

Behind the jokes sits an unusually sharp business record. In 2007 the pair and their lawyer, Kevin Morris, negotiated a 50-50 joint venture with Comedy Central on every South Park revenue stream outside television. In 2021 they signed a 900-million-dollar deal with what was then ViacomCBS, and in July 2025 a five-year agreement brought the whole series to Paramount+, reported at 1.5 billion dollars. Their AI studio, Deep Voodoo, grew out of Sassy Justice, a 2020 deepfake web series made with Peter Serafinowicz, and it created the shifting faces in Kendrick Lamar’s video for “The Heart Part 5”.

Casa Bonita is where that record looks less tidy. In 2021 Parker and Stone paid 3.1 million dollars for the bankrupt Lakewood restaurant they had loved as children and later put into an episode. They then spent about 40 million dollars restoring it and, at the soft opening in May 2023, scrapped tipping in favour of a flat 30 dollars an hour. Generous by Colorado standards, it did not settle things. The performers unionised, a charge of unfair labour practices was filed with the National Labor Relations Board in September 2025, and on October 30 that year the performers walked out, with Actors’ Equity president Brooke Shields publicly criticising the owners. It punctured a comfortable idea: that two satirists who mock the powerful would never sit across the table from their own workers. In May 2026, on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the pair put the real cost of the restaurant at around 50 million dollars and said they were still glad they had done it.

On screen, the show is in its best run in years. The 2025 run delivered its highest adult audience share in decades, and the episode “Sermon on the ‘Mount” earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program; Stone already holds five Primetime Emmys for the series, plus a Peabody. On August 13, 2026, Bill Hader inducted Parker and Stone into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Season 29 premiered on September 16, 2026, in a mock rebranding as “South America”, a dig at the official renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. In September the pair also took the blame for the delay of their live-action comedy with Lamar and his pgLang partner Dave Free, which Parker directs and Stone produces through their company Park County: “We take full responsibility for the schedule delay of this movie.”

Stone keeps his private life largely out of view. He married Angela Howard, a Comedy Central executive he met in 2001, in 2008, and they have two children. He calls himself an atheist who admires religion more than he mocks it and, in 2006, described himself as a libertarian. The drummer never left: at a South Park anniversary concert at Red Rocks he played with Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.

Two more Season 29 episodes are scheduled for November 11 and November 25, 2026, and the series reaches its 30th anniversary in 2027. The Lamar film still has no release date. The weekly deadline, however, is fixed, and Stone has spent his whole career treating it as the point rather than the price.

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Tags: actors, The Book of Mormon, animators, Matt Stone, producers, South Park, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, Team America: World Police

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