Mikey Day
Mikey Day is an actor, born 1980.
Mikey Day was a writer before he was a face. Hired onto the Saturday Night Live writing staff ahead of the show's 39th season in 2013, he spent three years supplying other people's sketches, joined the cast as a featured player in the 42nd season in 2016, and was promoted to repertory status from the 44th. That order matters. Performers who arrive through the writers' room tend to build sketches around a structure rather than around themselves, and Day's screen work still has the fingerprints of someone who thinks in premises first.
Before that he had been an on-air correspondent for Jay Leno, on both The Tonight Show and the later prime-time experiment, which is an unglamorous but excellent apprenticeship: write to a deadline, then deliver it yourself, on camera, tonight.
The film work follows the pattern of most current SNL cast members, comedies that want a reliable straight man for a handful of scenes. He is the priest in one, a talking cereal mascot in another. The exception is his hosting job on the Netflix baking series Is It Cake?, where the format asks for warmth and steady patter instead of characters, and Day turns out to be unusually good at it. Hosting is the least respected skill in comedy and one of the hardest to fake.
Movies (10)
TV (6)
Where to start with Mikey Day
Saturday Night Live is the whole argument, and the sketches to look for are the engineered ones, a set of rules the scene keeps escalating, rather than a single impression stretched to four minutes. Day is usually the one holding the frame steady while somebody else detonates.
After that, Is It Cake? is the surprise: a silly premise hosted with real generosity, and the closest thing to a showcase for what he is like without a wig. Unfrosted gives him a costumed bit that plays to the same instincts, Home Sweet Home Alone and Brittany Runs a Marathon are small supporting turns worth catching only if you already like him, and Good Burger 2 has him appearing under his own name, which is the joke.