Seth Meyers

Seth Meyers is a writer who ended up on camera, and the career only makes sense in that order. He joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2001, and from 2006 he was running the writers' room as head writer while also anchoring Weekend Update, a combination that meant he spent eight years both setting the show's political temperature and delivering it himself, in the one format that rewards clean sentence construction over big characters.

He left in 2014 for Late Night on NBC, which he has hosted since, and where the desk turned out to suit him better than the sketch stage ever did. The long monologue segments are essentially Update grown up, built from chains of setups that keep escalating past the point where a joke would normally stop. He also created Documentary Now!, a straight faced parody series that is the most formally adventurous thing attached to his name.

His film work is a list of small parts in other people's comedies: Chet Krogl in American Dreamz, a drunk in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Professor Alan Kitzens in Journey to the Center of the Earth, a supporting turn in New Year's Eve. He appears as himself in the film Late Night and in the documentary Will & Harper. The acting was never the ambition; the writing was, and everything durable in the career runs back to it.