Jerry Trainor
Jerry Trainor is an actor, born 1977.
Nickelodeon has employed him, in one form or another, since 2004. Before that there were bit parts in two 2001 films, the Lanky Kid in Donnie Darko and Tommy in Evolution, the sort of credits that usually predict a career of one-scene weirdos.
Instead he became Crazy Steve on Drake & Josh and then Spencer Shay on iCarly, and Spencer turned into a career. He played the character across iCarly, Victorious, Sam & Cat and a feature-length crossover, then again in the 2021 revival as a man in his forties. Three Kids' Choice Awards came out of that run, along with a Daytime Emmy nomination for voicing Dudley Puppy in T.U.F.F. Puppy.
The skill involved is specific and badly undervalued. Trainor plays grown men with no impulse control and gives them total commitment, never once winking at the camera to signal that he knows better. Children's comedy lives or dies on that refusal to condescend, and most adult actors cannot manage it for a whole scene, let alone a decade. Spencer works because Trainor plays a man who sincerely believes his terrible sculptures are art.
Outside Nickelodeon the record is thin: Crossing Jordan early on, Will Canton in Law & Order True Crime (2017), voice work in Predator: Killer of Killers (2025). Given the shape of it, that looks like a choice rather than a limit.
Movies (9)
TV (10)
Where to start with Jerry Trainor
Two shows, and they are genuinely different jobs. Drake & Josh gives you Crazy Steve, a supporting bit built entirely out of volume and menace, and it is the funnier of his two signature characters.
iCarly gives you Spencer, which is the real performance: a whole adult life played as sustained enthusiasm, holding a sitcom together for years without ever being its point. Start there, and if it takes, iCarly is that rare revival worth watching, because the joke of an overgrown man-child has aged into something with a little melancholy in it.
T.U.F.F. Puppy is where the voice work lives, and it earned the Emmy nomination. Sam & Cat and Victorious are crossover curiosities. For the pre-Nickelodeon version, he is on screen briefly in Donnie Darko and Evolution, and you would never guess what came next.
The Nickelodeon years
About a decade as the most reliably unhinged adult on the network. Spencer Shay in iCarly is the essential one, played at a permanent pitch of enthusiasm that is much harder to sustain than it looks.
The voice work and the revival
T.U.F.F. Puppy got him a Daytime Emmy nomination as the voice lead, and the iCarly revival let Spencer age rather than freezing him, which most reboots refuse to do. The rest is steady jobbing work.
The outliers
The work outside children's television, which is thinner and more interesting than you would guess. Donnie Darko is the early bit part, and Law and Order True Crime is the most serious thing he has done.