Rhys Darby

Rhys Darby's stand-up is built out of things most comedians cannot do: mime, sound effects, whole machines and animals reproduced with his mouth and his hands. He was nominated for New Zealand's Billy T Award in 2001 and 2002 and won the Fred Dagg Award for best New Zealand show in 2012, and the physical act is still visible inside every screen performance he gives.

The character he plays is extremely specific: a man of enormous confidence and very little information, permanently enthusiastic, almost always wrong, and impossible to dislike. Nigel Billingsley in the two Jumanji films is a lovely piece of comic engineering, a guide whose entire function is to repeat his own dialogue, and Darby plays the repetition as personality. Psycho Sam in Hunt for the Wilderpeople gets about eight minutes and is the most quoted thing in the film. Anton in What We Do in the Shadows leads a werewolf pack he is mainly trying to keep polite.

Away from the supporting roles he has built a second career in voice work, from Trolls and Arthur Christmas to Monsters at Work and Pacific Rim: The Black, and a third as a leading man on television. Our Flag Means Death is the one that finally handed him a series pitched entirely at his frequency, and Next Goal Wins, Uproar and Relax, I'm from the Future have kept him in New Zealand and Pacific stories rather than in American ensembles.