YES! The Music of Matt Berry

Though known in the U.S. since 2019 as Laszlo Cravensworth in the FX show What We Do in the Shadows—based on Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 vampire mockumentary—Matt Berry is a veteran comic actor in the UK, star of some of the oddest TV projects ever greenlit, like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004), AD/BC: A Rock Opera (2004), and Snuffbox (2006), and has also appeared in supporting roles in The Mighty Boosh (2004–2007) and The IT Crowd (2007–2010). With his rich, announcer-style over-enunciation—pronouncing the “t,” for example, in “ritual,” as he does narrating the faux nature film Wild Love (2015)—Berry is a singular comedic talent, so perhaps inevitably his breakthrough came in quasi-autobiographical form, as actor and voiceover artist Stephen Toast in the Channel 4 series Toast of London (2012–2015), a performance that snagged him a BAFTA. Like most Berry characters, Toast is a bellowing, beefy Britisher, self-regarding, pompous, earnest, devoid of irony or self-awareness. Yet unlike Berry’s more two-dimensional supporting roles, Toast has an inherent likeability; he can be petty and vicious, but he inhabits a world far pettier and more vicious, and you can’t help rooting for him in the face of the innumerable humiliations he suffers.