Tom McGrath

Tom McGrath, born in Lynnwood, Washington in 1964, is a studio lifer rather than a hired hand. He is an animator and voice actor who moved into directing from inside DreamWorks, and in 2005 he co-wrote and co-directed Madagascar with Eric Darnell. It was a hit large enough to generate two sequels, a spin-off television series, and a feature built around the penguins, and McGrath stayed attached to all of it.

The odd wrinkle is that he also plays Skipper, the clipped, paranoid, faintly militarised penguin who runs the funniest subplot in his own movie, and he has kept the role through every sequel and spin-off. Most directors who cast themselves are making a joke. McGrath treats it as a second job, and you can hear it in the cutting: the penguin scenes are edited to his own delivery, all hard consonants and dead-flat pauses, comedy built from timing rather than punchlines. He does the same in miniature for colleagues, taking one-scene voice parts across the DreamWorks slate, a hanger-on in Shrek the Third, a prison guard in Megamind, a television chef in The Boss Baby.

His two features outside the zoo are the interesting ones. Megamind (2010) is a superhero parody that commits fully to the villain as its protagonist and finds real loneliness in him. The Boss Baby (2017) went the opposite way, a broad high-concept comedy that became his biggest commercial success, picked up Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, and brought him back to direct the 2021 sequel.