Spotlight on Peter Serafinowich | TQS Magazine

Peter Serafinowicz a British actor best known for his movie roles in Shaun of the Dead and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. He was born in Liverpool in 1972 and started out in BBC comedy shows on Radio 1 and Radio 4. His first radio show was aired in 1993 and was a comedy show about the music industry. It’s no surprise he did so well in radio- he has a very distinctive, deep husky voice.

With such a deep voice, Serafinowicz could have spent his whole career playing smoky-voiced villains, but instead he has concentrated on his biggest passion- comedy.

His first TV role was in political satire The Election Night Armistice and then he went on to star in cult comedy Spaced, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes. In Spaced he played Simon Pegg’s arch-nemesis Duane- the serious, smooth-talking lothario who stole Tim’s (Simon Pegg’s character) girlfriend. (In the end Tim gets his own back by shooting Duane in the nether regions during a paint ball fight reminiscent of Apocalypse Now.) Serafinowicz worked with Pegg again in feature film Shaun of the Dead, playing Pegg’s serious, straight-laced flatmate.

In 1999 the gravely-voiced actor provided the voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Darth Maul was the terrifying villain with the red and black face and little horns on his head. He didn’t stick to playing villains for long and in 2002 it was time for Serafinowicz to showcase his own comedy writing talents with the series Look Around You, which he co-wrote with Robert Popper.

The series consisted of 10 minutes spoofs of 1970s school science videos. The second series of the show parodied 1980s show Tomorrow’s World, educating viewers about fictional futuristic products like a synthesizer made of water and a system for predicting the results of horse races, invented by a horse.

In 2007 the BBC gave Serafinowicz his own TV show named The Peter Serafinowicz Show. For this series the comedian won the Best Entertainer prize at the Rose d’Or awards ceremony.

More recently the actor has turned his talents to directing- he directed two music videos for Hot Chip and is rumoured to be directing a dark comedy film this year. Of course, he couldn’t let his amazing voice go to waste- his rolling, rugged tones can be heard as the voice-over on the Motors.co.uk advert.

Although not as famous as his peers Simon Pegg, Ruth Jones and Julia Davis, Peter Serafinowicz is a critically-acclaimed comedy writer and actor and has appeared in some of the best comedy series to come out of Britain in recent years: Spitting Image, Smack the Pony, I’m Alan Partridge, Spaced, Black Books, Shooting Stars and of course, Look Around You.

He has 710 thousand Twitter followers, putting him in the Top 50 Most Followed British Twitter feeds. His most popular Tweets are one liner jokes like this one:

“If the apocalypse doesn’t happen tomorrow, don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world.”