Andy Nyman

Andy Nyman was born in Leicester in 1966 and has two professions that turn out to be one. He is an actor, and he is a magician who has worked for years with the illusionist Derren Brown. The second job explains the first, because everything he has written for himself is engineered the way a trick is engineered, with the attention pointed at the wrong hand.

Ghost Stories, the horror play he created with Jeremy Dyson, is the clearest case. It ran on stage as a piece of theatre built around what an audience will accept, and the pair then adapted and co-directed it as a film, with Nyman playing Professor Goodman, a debunker of the supernatural. The shape of it is a magician's shape rather than a screenwriter's.

As a hired actor he is the sweaty English nerve ending. Gordon in Severance, Howard in Death at a Funeral, Patrick in Charlie Brooker's Dead Set: men who panic articulately. He is also very good in the register nobody casts him in often enough, playing real people under pressure, in The Eichmann Show and as Hermann van Pels in A Small Light.

A great deal of his work is voice work the audience never credits to him, including the sheep called Nuts across the Shaun the Sheep films and series. He has been nominated for Olivier Awards for the West End revivals of Fiddler on the Roof, Hello, Dolly! and The Producers.