Matt Berry

Matt Berry’s Unmistakable Voice and the Characters It Built

There is a specific frequency that Matt Berry operates on – a rich, rolling baritone that lands somewhere between Shakespearean gravitas and barely suppressed absurdity. It is a voice that commands rooms, anchors comedies, and turns even a throwaway line into something worth rewinding. Emerging from Bromham, Bedfordshire, Berry studied contemporary arts at Nottingham Trent University before cutting his teeth as a runner in the industry, picking up early screen work in 1998 on BSkyB’s gaming magazine show Game Over. That low-key start gave little indication of what was coming.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and the Birth of a Cult Figure

The 2004 Channel 4 series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace handed Berry his first major breakthrough as Todd Rivers/Lucien Sanchez, a supporting player in one of the strangest and most beloved comedies British television has produced. The show’s deliberate badness – its aggressively wooden acting, its horror-soap parody aesthetic – demanded performers who could commit to the joke with total sincerity. Berry understood this instinctively. His follow-up in the 2006 spin-off Man to Man with Dean Learner deepened his foothold in cult British comedy and set the stage for everything that followed.

The IT Crowd and Douglas Reynholm

When Graham Linehan cast Berry as Douglas Reynholm in The IT Crowd, it gave him the largest mainstream platform he’d had to that point. Joining the show in 2007, Berry played the absurdly self-confident, spectacularly oblivious new boss of Reynholm Industries with a swagger that felt both earned and utterly ludicrous. The role ran through to 2013, earning him consistent recognition as one of British comedy’s most reliable comic performers and introducing him to audiences well beyond his cult fanbase.

Toast of London and a BAFTA

Co-creating and starring in Toast of London gave Berry the rare opportunity to build a vehicle entirely around his sensibilities. Playing Steven Toast – a pompous, mostly unsuccessful stage actor lurching from one catastrophe to the next – Berry also scored the series himself, adding yet another layer to a project that won him the 2015 BAFTA Award for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme. The show, which ran from 2012 to 2015 before returning as Toast of Tinseltown, stands as the clearest statement of what Berry does when given full creative control.

What We Do in the Shadows and Laszlo Cravensworth

The FX adaptation of What We Do in the Shadows, which premiered in 2019, cast Berry as Laszlo Cravensworth, an English nobleman vampire with an appetite for revelry and an absolute gift for misreading every situation. The role ran for six seasons and earned Berry a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, along with two Critics’ Choice Television Award nominations. It became his most-watched work, finding him a substantial American audience who may not have encountered the British comedies that built his reputation.

Animation and Voice Work Across Film and Television

Berry’s voice has always been the point of entry – the thing that stops people mid-scroll or mid-episode and demands attention. His animation and voice credits reflect exactly that quality. He voiced Bubbles, an inter-dimensional dolphin, in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in 2015, then returned to the SpongeBob universe as King Poseidon in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run in 2021. He voiced Prince Merkimer in Matt Groening’s Netflix animated series Disenchantment, and took on the character of Shlub in Dan Harmon’s Fox animated series Krapopolis. His voice work in The Wild Robot in 2024 extended his animation presence further, while his involvement in A Minecraft Movie in 2025 brought him into one of the year’s highest-profile family releases. His agency, Sue Terry Voices, describes that baritone as rich, deep, and instantly recognisable – a description that undersells it only slightly.

Music, BAFTA Games, and a Career That Refuses Easy Categories

Eleven studio albums sit alongside the acting and voice work in Berry’s catalogue, a body of music that pulls from psychedelia, folk, and classic pop without sounding like any of them in particular. The breadth is characteristic. In 2025, Berry received a BAFTA Games Award nomination for Performer in a Supporting Role for his work in Thank Goodness You’re Here, a further signal that his voice work extends into games as well as animation and television.

Most Known Roles of Matt Berry

• Laszlo Cravensworth – What We Do in the Shadows (FX, 2019-2024)
• Steven Toast – Toast of London / Toast of Tinseltown (Channel 4, 2012-2022)
• Douglas Reynholm – The IT Crowd (Channel 4, 2007-2013)
• Todd Rivers / Lucien Sanchez – Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (Channel 4, 2004)
• Shlub – Krapopolis (Fox, 2023-present)
• Prince Merkimer – Disenchantment (Netflix, 2018-2021)
• Bubbles – The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015)
• King Poseidon – The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2021)
• The Butt Witch – Twelve Forever (Netflix, 2015-2019)