Actor / Director Profile

Irish comedian Dylan Moran was born in Navan, County Meath in 1971. Leaving school without any qualifications aged 16, Moran quickly became attracted to stand-up comedy and debuted in 1992 at a comedy club in Dublin, The Comedy Cellar. A year later, he won the Channel Four comedy newcomer's So You Think You're Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival, and began developing his comedy routines into a one-man show, Gurgling for Money, for which he won the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award in 1996, and which he subsequently took to a nationwide tour of the UK. His exposure at the Edinburgh Festival also led to him getting programmed at international stand-up comedy festivals worldwide.Subsequently, Moran took to writing and performing for British television. He has starred in the BBC sitcom _How Do You Want Me? (1998)_ , and - more importantly - in 2000 he was commissioned by Channel Four for the sitcom _Black Books (2000)_ . He wrote and starred in three 6-episode series of this comedy. Co-starring popular British stand-up Bill Bailey , who was nominated for the Perrier Award the year Moran won, _Black Books (2000)_ sees Moran play a character close to his stand-up comedy persona: an unsociable misanthrope, reminiscent of the John Cleese sitcom character Basil Fawlty, that shares a great love of wine with one of razor-sharp put-downs of all things human. Also, his character Bernard Black's often surreal views on everyday things and on human behavior is close to his stand-up persona's dealing with them.The same year the first series of Black Books aired Moran took his one-man show Ready, Steady, Cough on a UK tour, followed two years later by _Dylan Moran: Monster (2004)_ . This was followed by Monster II in 2004.In the late 1990's, Moran also moved from doing stand-up to working on a film acting CV. He played opposite Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill (1999) , co-starred with Michael Caine in _The Actors (2003)_ and had parts in the Simon Pegg comedy _Shaun Of The Dead (2004)_ and the Michael Winterbottom film _A Cock And Bull Story (2005)_ .Moran's live stand-up comedy is unique in that it merges two strands of stand-up that seemed incompatible for a long time: sharp observational humor, and surreal and fantastical language-based absurdity. On the one hand, he has a clear influence from what could be called an American school of stand-up comedy that is heavily observational. On the other, Moran's comedy is characterized by a use of language similar to the stand-up comedy of Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble : surreal associative leaps between on the one side observations and on the other fantasies, verbally painting bizarre and absurd worlds, often through a use of stream-of-consciousness narration. His language is often highly poetic, resembling a James Joyce that has had one too many.Moran is very reluctant to give interviews on his personal life and even on his career, a fact parodied in a staged interview inter-cut with the recording of his live stand-up show Monster on its DVD release.