Aisling Bea
Aisling Bea is an actor, born 1984.
Stand-up was the door. The Kildare-born comedian, actress and writer won the So You Think You're Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012, only the second woman to take it in the award's then twenty-five-year history, and the British panel-show circuit absorbed her almost immediately. She is a regular on QI, a team captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats, and a fixture on The Last Leg, Live at the Apollo and A League of Their Own, plus a series of Taskmaster that is not among the credits listed here.
The work she should be known for is This Way Up, the Channel 4 comedy she created, wrote and starred in, which also does not appear here. It matters anyway, because it explains what she is doing in everything else: writing and playing the specific Irish register where relentless jokes are a load-bearing wall in front of something bad.
As an actor she is used two ways. Comedy hires her for warmth and speed: Carol Mercer in Home Sweet Home Alone, Rebecca in Love Wedding Repeat, Rachel in Greatest Days, Kate opposite a duplicated man in Living with Yourself. Drama hires her for the crack in the surface: State of the Union, Claudia Rosencrantz in Quiz, Mari Butler in Hard Sun, a nurse in The Fall, and Susan in the 2024 film Get Away.
She is better than the panel-show volume suggests, and the recent credits, Chivalry and Alice & Jack among them, are where the acting is getting more interesting.
Movies (7)
TV (27)
- Fair City (1989)
- QI (2003)
- 8 Out of 10 Cats (2005)
- The Last Leg (2013)
- Amphibia (2019)
- The Jonathan Ross Show (2011)
- A League of Their Own (2010)
- The Fall (2013)
- Trollied (2011)
- The Russell Howard Hour (2017)
- Travel Man: 48 Hours in... (2015)
- This Week (2003)
- Blankety Blank (2021)
- The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice (2017)
- Living with Yourself (2019)
- I Feel Bad (2018)
- Duck Quacks Don't Echo (2014)
- Live at the Apollo (2004)
- State of the Union (2019)
- Guessable (2020)
- Alice & Jack (2024)
- The Traitors: Uncloaked (2024)
- The Assets (2014)
- Chivalry (2022)
- The Ranganation (2019)
- Quiz (2020)
- Hard Sun (2018)
Where to start with Aisling Bea
For the acting, Living with Yourself first. She is the wife in a comedy about a man cloned into two versions of himself, and the show only works because someone has to be the person actually paying for the premise. She plays that without turning Kate into a scold, which is harder than it looks.
State of the Union and Quiz are the next two, both short, both smart, both using her as an adult in a room of people behaving badly. Chivalry is the sharpest of the recent comedies and Get Away the strangest swerve of the recent lot.
For the comedian rather than the actress, any episode of QI or 8 Out of 10 Cats will do. And her own series, This Way Up, is the one to seek out if you want the writing as well as the performance.