Richard Ellef Ayoade is a British actor, comedian, director, screenwriter, and broadcaster. He is best known for his television roles, such as voicing Templeton in Strange Hill High, the Snowman in Danger Mouse, the latter titular character of Apple & Onion, Alva Gunderson in Disenchantment, and portraying Maurice Moss in the British sitcom The IT Crowd. He is also well-known for his various film roles, such as playing a Forensic Investigator in Paddington 2, as well as voicing Mr. Pickles and Treebor in the stop-motion films The Boxtrolls and Early Man (respectively), Ice Cream Cone in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, and Professor Marmalade, the main antagonist of the 2022 DreamWorks animated film The Bad Guys.
For Disney, he voiced Zero (Q9-O) in the 2019 Disney+ series The Mandalorian, Counselor Jerry B in the 2020 Disney•Pixar animated film Soul and its prequel short 22 vs. Earth, Declan in Monsters at Work, Clem Clam in Hamster & Gretel, and Xeni in Dream Productions.
Ayoade was born in the Hammersmith district of London, and is the son of a Norwegian mother and Nigerian father. The family moved to Ipswich when he was young. At the age of 15, he developed an interest in film "beyond Star Wars and Back to the Future" and began exploring the works of directors Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini. He studied at the independent St. Joseph's College in Ipswich, where he recalls being "obsessed" with J. D. Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye. He was so obsessed with the book that he started to dress like its protagonist, Holden Caulfield.
From 1995 to 1998, Ayoade studied law at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he won the Martin Steele Prize for play production and was president of the amateur theatrical club Footlights. Ayoade said that his parents would not approve of studies considered to be of the "Regency era", adding that "a non-vocational degree seemed such an outlandish indulgence." He also said that his degree in law was no longer a viable "fallback" for him and that he would need to "go back to square one".
Roles[]
(The Mandalorian)
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(Hamster & Gretel)
