Nick Frost

Nick Frost brings an unusually grounded presence to comedy. Even when the situation involves zombies, alien fugitives or a suspiciously eventful Gloucestershire village, he plays the person rather than the punchline. His characters can be blundering, loyal, frustrated or unexpectedly tender, often shifting between those qualities without losing their essential warmth. Born in Dagenham on 28 March 1972, Frost did not follow a conventional route into acting. He left school and worked for a shipping company, later spending two years at a kibbutz in Israel. While working as a waiter in North London, he met Simon Pegg; they became close friends and flatmates. That friendship helped shape Frost’s first major television role when Pegg and Jessica Hynes wrote Mike, Tim’s army-obsessed best friend, for the Channel 4 comedy Spaced. Frost’s screen partnership with Pegg became a defining thread in his film career. He appeared in Shaun of the Dead, the romantic zombie comedy written by Pegg and Edgar Wright, before playing enthusiastic Constable Danny Butterman opposite Pegg’s Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz. The pair then co-wrote and starred in Paul, a science-fiction comedy about a fugitive alien. Frost later played Andy Knightley in The World’s End and joined Pegg again as Thomson and Thompson in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. His work extends well beyond that partnership. Frost has written and presented the survival spoof Danger!, co-written and starred in The Sofa of Time, led the Sky Atlantic comedy Mr. Sloane and appeared in two series of the science-fiction sitcom Hyperdrive. His television credits also include Man Stroke Woman and Into the Badlands, while his film work includes Kinky Boots. Frost released the memoir Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies in 2015. In January 2024, he was announced as Gobber the Belch in the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, and he is set to portray Rubeus Hagrid in HBO’s television adaptation of Harry Potter. Across acting, comedy and writing, his appeal remains rooted in the same thing: making outsized comic worlds feel recognisably human.