David Mitchell

David James Stuart Mitchell (born 14 July 1974) is a British comedian, actor, and writer.

Mitchell rose to prominence alongside Robert Webb as part of the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb.

The duo starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, in which Mitchell plays Mark Corrigan.

David James Stuart Mitchell was born in Salisbury on 14 July 1974, the son of hotel managers Kathryn Grey (née Hughes) and Ian Douglas Mitchell.

As his mother is Welsh, hailing from Swansea, and his father was born to a family that was originally Scottish, he considers himself British rather than specifically English.

In 1977, when Mitchell was two years old, his parents left their jobs to give lectures on hotel management as this gave them more time with him.

He has a brother named Daniel, who is seven years younger.

Mitchell's family moved to Oxford, where his parents became lecturers at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University).

He attended the independent preparatory New College School.

Rejected by Merton College, Oxford, he went in 1993 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied history.

In his first year at university, he met Robert Webb during rehearsals for a Footlights production of Cinderella in 1993, and the two men soon established a comedy partnership.

According to Mitchell, these factors had a detrimental effect on his academic performance at university and he attained a 2:2 in his final exams.

Before his break into comedy, Mitchell worked as an usher at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre, and in the cloakroom of TFI Friday among other jobs.

"'We have superficial differences and underlying similarities. We pretty much agree about what we think is funny. But we come across differently. We get on really. And together we're greater than the sum of our parts.'"

There, he began performing with the Cambridge Footlights, of which he became president for the 1995–1996 academic year.

Mitchell's first project with Webb was in January 1995, a show about a nuclear apocalypse entitled Innocent Millions Dead or Dying: A Wry Look at the Post-Apocalyptic Age.

Webb later described it as being "fucking terrible".

After leaving university he and Webb began performing a number of two-man shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.

As a result of their performances at the Edinburgh Fringe, the duo were given the chance to write for Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller and for series two of Big Train.

After minor work on The Jack Docherty Show and Comedy Nation, their first break into television acting was in 2000, on the short-lived BBC sketch show Bruiser, which they primarily wrote, and starred in.

The show also featured future Academy Award and BAFTA winner Olivia Colman, who would become a regular cast member of Mitchell and Webb projects, and Martin Freeman, later of The Office fame.

Other cast members included Matthew Holness and Charlotte Hudson.

Additional material for the show was provided by various people, including Ricky Gervais and James Bachman.

In a 2006 interview with The Independent, he recalled his childhood dreams: "When I was at school I either wanted to be a comedian-stroke-actor or prime minister. But I didn't admit that to other people, I said I wanted to be a barrister and that made my parents very happy. I didn't admit I wanted to be a comedian until I came to university, met a lot of other people who wanted to be comedians, and realised it was an okay thing to say."

From the age of 13, Mitchell was educated at Abingdon School, a public school.

Having always been top of the class at primary school and prep school, he realised after moving to Abingdon that there were plenty of people more intelligent than he, so he turned his attention to debating and drama "where [he] had a chance of being the best".

Mitchell often took part in plays "largely because [he] got to play cards backstage".

His roles mainly consisted of small minute-long parts until he won the role of Rabbit in Winnie-the-Pooh.

This was the first time that he was "consciously aware [he] was doing a performance" and that this "was better, even, than playing cards".

He had been "obsessed" with comedy writing since his school days as he "always felt that doing a joke was the cleverest thing" and "would intrinsically prefer a parody of something to the actual thing itself".

Their first film, Magicians, was released in 2007.

He won the British Academy Television Award for Best Comedy Performance in 2009 for his performance.

They have written and starred in several sketch shows including Bruiser, The Mitchell and Webb Situation, That Mitchell and Webb Sound and That Mitchell and Webb Look.

They also starred in the British version of Apple's "Get a Mac" ad campaign.

He would explore his ancestry in a 2009 episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and discover his connection to the Gaelic scholars John Forbes and Alexander Robert Forbes.

They starred in the short-lived TV series Ambassadors in 2013, and have starred in the Channel 4 comedy-drama Back since 2017.

Mitchell starred as Owen in Think the Unthinkable and in the Ben Elton written BBC Two historical comedy Upstart Crow, playing William Shakespeare in the latter since 2016.

He is a frequent participant on British panel shows, being a team captain on Would I Lie to You?, the host of The Unbelievable Truth on BBC Radio 4 and the former host of The Bubble and Was It Something I Said?, as well as guesting on other panel shows including QI, The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Mock the Week, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Have I Got News for You.

He was also a co-host of the comedy news show 10 O'Clock Live.

As a writer, he contributes opinion pieces to British newspapers The Observer and The Guardian.