Reece Shearsmith, after Inside No. 9, opens his own museum of the dark

Reece Shearsmith

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 27, 1969 Kingston upon Hull, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor, comedian and writer
Known for	Shaun of the Dead, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The World's End
Awards	Perrier Comedy · 2 British Academy Television · Golden Rose of Montreux · Rose d'Or

For years, fans of Reece Shearsmith kept asking the same question: when would they be allowed into the room? He keeps a private museum of props from film and television sets and what his publisher calls “terrible and unexpected exhibits from our world and beyond”. This autumn he opened the doors in a book, Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me, and then went on the road to read from it by himself. That is the new part. For three decades the nightmares he wrote for British television were written in company, by four men in The League of Gentlemen and then by two, Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, in the BBC anthology series that defined both of them. The open question now is what the dark looks like when he alone holds the torch.

The book starts where he did. Its publisher, Quercus, describes the opening as “a terrifying nighttime visitation on a council estate in Hull”, the city where Reeson Wayne Shearsmith was born and raised. At Bretton Hall College of Education in West Yorkshire he met Mark Gatiss and Steve Pemberton. With the writer Jeremy Dyson they formed a stage act that won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and moved on to BBC radio.

The League of Gentlemen reached BBC Two in 1999 and invented Royston Vasey, a northern town filmed mostly in Hadfield, Derbyshire, its residents played almost entirely by Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith. His share included Edward Tattsyrup, who runs the Local Shop for local people with his wife Tubbs, the earnest theatre-in-education director Ollie Plimsolls, and the circus ringmaster Papa Lazarou. The show won a BAFTA, a Royal Television Society award and the Golden Rose of Montreux, ran for three series to 2002 and became a film, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, in 2005. What it left British comedy was proof that a sketch show could set out to frighten its audience and still be the funniest thing on television.

Around the League, Shearsmith built a character actor’s career where comedy meets genre. He played the soldier Dexter in Edgar Wright’s Spaced, turned up in Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End, and played Leo Bloom in The Producers in the West End. With Pemberton he created Psychoville, a serialised horror comedy about five strangers who receive the same anonymous blackmail note, which ran on BBC Two from 2009 to 2011 and won two British Comedy Awards. His turn as a henpecked chiropodist in the musical Betty Blue Eyes brought his first Laurence Olivier Award nomination in 2012.

The work he will be remembered for began in 2014. Inside No. 9 gave Shearsmith and Pemberton thirty minutes, a new cast and a new setting every week, with only a number and a hidden brass hare to connect the stories. Across its run the format let them write a near-silent burglary farce, a farce in iambic pentameter and a helpline drama shot entirely through a fixed office camera. It ran for nine series and 55 episodes until June 2024, won the Rose d’Or for comedy in 2016 and the BAFTA for scripted comedy in 2021, and ended with “Plodding On”, in which more than 55 former guest actors returned to play versions of themselves. It travelled as far as an immersive stage adaptation in Shanghai in 2023. The pair’s own stage version, Inside No. 9 Stage/Fright, opened in the West End in 2025, toured the UK and closed at the Hammersmith Apollo in January 2026.

On screen, Ben Wheatley has used him best. In A Field in England he plays Whitehead, a cowardly scholar lost in a hallucinatory Civil War field, and he returned for High-Rise and the lockdown horror In the Earth. He played Patrick Troughton in An Adventure in Space and Time, the drama Gatiss wrote about the birth of Doctor Who, and the killer Malcolm Webster in ITV’s The Widower. Recent years have added bigger rooms: the producer John Woolf in See How They Run, an Oxford tutor in Saltburn, Alan Turing in Netflix‘s 3 Body Problem and the voice of the robot Norbot in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. A second Olivier nomination came in 2020 for A Very Expensive Poison at the Old Vic.

The League’s legacy has one character he still has to answer for. In June 2020, as streaming services reviewed blackface in British comedy, Netflix removed every episode of The League of Gentlemen alongside Little Britain, and the British comedy site Chortle reported that the show fell foul of the purge because of Papa Lazarou, played by Shearsmith in dark make-up. Earlier that year he had defended the character: “It was not me doing a black man. It was always this clown-like make-up and we just came up with what we thought was the scariest idea to have in a sort of Child Catcher-like way.” The account of intent is probably sincere, and it misses the point: a white actor in dark face paint reads as blackface whatever the writers meant, and a troupe famous for daring is left defending itself with intent alone.

Since the last Stage/Fright show he has mostly worked alone. Things I Took from the Dark came out from Quercus on 8 October 2026, his first book outside the published scripts, and he illustrated it himself. “I’ve written it, drawn nearly 50 drawings to illustrate all these spooky exhibits,” he said. The exhibits include the screaming skull of Glamis Castle, the Highgate vampire and Gef, the talking mongoose of the Isle of Man. The reading tour that followed sold out in Manchester, and its late-October dates take in Edinburgh, Newcastle and his home city of Hull. On 23 October, Prime Video released the first episodes of Last One Laughing: Halloween, in which seven comedians try not to laugh, or scream, in a haunted house. He is also the voice of Bagman, the soldier whose mind lives on in a backpack, in Duncan Jones‘s animated Rogue Trooper, which premiered at Annecy in June 2026.

Shearsmith, born on 27 August 1969, is married to Jane Shearsmith, whom he met while touring a play; they have two children.

From 9 to 14 November 2026 he takes over from Rob Brydon as King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, a one-week guest role. On 10 February 2027 Apple TV premieres Prodigies, Will Sharpe’s comedy about two former child prodigies, with Sharpe and Ayo Edebiri in the leads and Shearsmith in the cast. Neither is a Pemberton and Shearsmith production, and neither looks like a step away from the dark. The museum is open, and it now has a single guide.

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Tags: actors, Saltburn, Reece Shearsmith, Inside No. 9, Mark Gatiss, Psychoville

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