Jimmy Tatro

YouTube built this career before the industry got involved. Tatro, born in Los Angeles in 1992, created and starred in the channel LifeAccordingToJimmy, writing, producing and directing the sketches himself with his friend Christian A. Pierce, and pulled in millions of subscribers doing it. Studio work followed rather than the other way round.

The type is fixed and he knows it: the loud, confident, catastrophically stupid young man. Rooster in 22 Jump Street, Lance Stonebreaker in Super Troopers 2, Dick Dawg in the Blue Mountain State film. What separates him from everyone else doing that part is that he refuses to look down on it. His idiots are not written from above, they have interior logic, they believe what they are saying, and the comedy comes from watching that logic hold together for one sentence too long.

American Vandal is where the approach paid off completely. As Dylan Maxwell he plays a high school suspect in a true-crime parody, and the whole conceit only functions because he is playing an actual person rather than a punchline: the audience has to be able to believe both possibilities at once, and that depends entirely on the performance.

Since then he has spread out sensibly. Firefighter Savage in The King of Staten Island, PJ Palfrey in The Wolf of Snow Hollow, Troy in Theater Camp, Jim Boy McCarden in Bad Education, Connor across the run of Home Economics, plus a steady voice-over line in Smallfoot, Strays, Rumble and Monsters at Work. There is also a part in Scream 7.