Chris Addison
Chris Addison is an actor, born 1971.
Addison built his name on lecture-format stand-up, shows structured as a talk with a thesis rather than a run of bits, two of which he later adapted for BBC Radio 4. That background matters, because it explains the thing he does on screen: a man performing his own cleverness slightly too hard.
Armando Iannucci cast him as Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, and that was the career. Ollie is the special adviser convinced he is the sharpest person in the room, wrong about it in a different way each episode, and Addison plays him with an eager, wounded ambition that makes the abuse he absorbs funny rather than cruel. In the Loop in 2009 exported the same character, renamed Toby Wright, into a film about the sales pitch for a war, and he is the moral centre of it purely by being the least competent liar present.
Elsewhere he was David Blood in Skins, Seb in a Doctor Who two-parter, Colin in the Horrible Histories film, and a regular panellist on Mock the Week. The pivot came behind the camera: he moved into directing television comedy, then made his first feature, The Hustle, in 2019, a remake of a con-artist comedy. It is a broader, blunter thing than anything he had acted in, which was rather the point.
He turns up again in 2025 as Simon Howler in the Spinal Tap sequel, which is the correct lineage for him: British satire feeding into the American mockumentary tradition that shaped it.
Movies (5)
TV (4)
Where to start with Chris Addison
The Thick of It first, and there is no serious argument for anything else. Ollie Reeder is one of the great written idiots of British television, and the show's improvised-feeling density means Addison is doing more work than the swearing lets you notice.
In the Loop follows naturally and is the better entry point if you want a single sitting: same world, same character in all but name, sharper stakes. Skins shows him doing authority instead of flailing, and Mock the Week is where a lot of Britain first clocked the face. Doctor Who: Dark Water / Death in Heaven gives him a nicely oily bit part. Then The Hustle, not because it is good, but because it is the clearest evidence of where his ambitions moved once acting stopped being enough.