‘They said: there’s this part … he’s an idiot!’ SNL UK’s Freddie Meredith on his unlikely route to comedy’s big leagues

Until a few weeks ago, Freddie Meredith’s IMDb page was full of names like “Seb” and “George” and “Philip Noonan”. Lately, however, it’s started saying things like “Olly Murs” and “Liam Gallagher”. The characters that aren’t listed are even weirder: perhaps you’ve come across his recent turn as an east London mosquito? Or Jeff Goldblum’s troubled nephew? How about the tech billionaire tasked with introducing King Charles to a new AI assistant who looks exactly like Diana, Princess of Wales?

It’s not just Meredith’s online CV that has had a radical overhaul. At the start of this summer, the 33-year-old was working in a bar, where he would sometimes get recognised by fans of Bafta-winning BBC sitcom Such Brave Girls, in which he played the protagonist’s ludicrously tenacious boyfriend. He mimics punters’ confusion at seeing a guy off the TV serving them: “What’s happened to you?!”

Nothing had. Meredith was a jobbing actor saving up for his Edinburgh fringe debut, Need a Light?, an hour of character comedy about a lonely oddball desperately trying to make friends in a nightclub smoking area. But when August arrived, it looked as if the investment might not pay off: Meredith describes the first few performances as “crap. It was just not working.”

Things have improved immeasurably since then. With a few tweaks, the show found its groove and went on to become one of the festival’s hottest tickets, leading to a best newcomer nomination and an instantly sold-out and twice-extended London transfer. Then, a few days before his final show, his agent got a call from the producers of Saturday Night Live UK, “out of the blue”. They wanted to add him to the cast for its second series. Could he start on Tuesday?

It’s early October when Meredith bemusedly recounts that “overwhelming” job offer. Yet sitting beside the empty SNL UK stage (he did offer to spend the interview with one leg faux-casually propped up on it, which is what his Need a Light? character would have done), he seems right at home. Between his impressions of Britpop stars (who may actually be Russian operatives), lascivious insects and Silicon Valley bros, he has undoubtedly hit the ground running.

Still, it’s been a lot. Acting alongside guest host Jeff Goldblum on his first show was surreal enough to drown out the nerves, but the second instalment was scarier – partly because he’d also written two of the sketches, including a sublime full-cast X Factor tribute (hence the Olly Murs impersonation).

Meredith spent a chunk of last year auditioning for this British version of the US sketch institution, but ultimately wasn’t invited to join the original cast. He suspects it was because his material was too strange: he did his main audition in the guise of “a guy who was completely obsessed with Peaky Blinders” and was told his act might not translate to US audiences. In the end, he got the sense the producers “wanted to make sure the show had this real mainstream pull”.

Yet when Meredith tuned in from home, he was surprised to see how “weird” SNL UK had ended up. Instead of courting viewers with broad comedy, the show has leaned into uncompromising Britishness and undiluted idiosyncrasy (see last season’s sketch reimagining Jools Holland as a demon who appears if you don’t put your clocks forward). An SNL rep tells me producers “don’t provide comments on individual castings”, meaning there’s no official word on the reason behind Meredith’s last-minute addition (they didn’t tell him either), but to me he seems like the obvious missing ingredient in this comedy-nerd-friendly take on the format. Mainly because his speciality – disconcertingly awkward men who cleave to a quintessentially British cringe-comedy heritage (your David Brents, your Alan Partridges) – had no representative in the cast before.

Meredith grew up in west London, 10 minutes down the road from the SNL UK studios. At school, he had no particular acting ambitions until he was cast in a sixth-form production of The Libertine, Stephen Jeffreys’ Restoration-set play about the Earl of Rochester (“crazy play to do at school”). The performance was “probably the most fun” he’d ever had, so he decided to apply to drama school. He got into Rada and signed with an agent upon graduating, but momentum soon stalled. Although Meredith is nowhere near as socially inept as his comedy creations, his vibe is clearly not swaggering alpha – yet in his early career he was being put up for the kind of roles that “let’s say, James Norton is doing now. That I’m never, ever going to get in a million years because it’s leading-man stuff. People didn’t really understand who I was.”

At a loose end during lockdown, he decided to show them. A longtime comedy enthusiast – in his teens he’d seen Tim Key perform and “laughed so much; I’d never seen anything that really properly spoke to me before” – he began uploading left-field character studies to Instagram. The first was a spoof of a post-play Q&A with an actor who is so ill at ease that he seems to be having an out-of-body experience. Somehow, the clip “seemed to find its way through to my comedy heroes” including Jamie Demetriou, Lolly Adefope and the producer Rupert Majendie, who invited him to perform in east London soon after. Meredith was reluctant, but his girlfriend convinced him to grab the opportunity. He was immediately put on a bill with – what are the chances? – Key himself.

That was in 2021; in the intervening years, Meredith has combined small roles in TV shows such as Big Boys and Andor, and eccentric live comedy (at one gig I attended a few years ago, he simply did a jig in a football kit and massively long trainers), with social media skits involving various odd men made even more uncanny via glitchy visual distortion and agonised micro-expressions.

This year, he finally decided to write a full show for one of these characters: the sad-case protagonist of Need a Light? arrives at the club on his own in a shirt, tie, skinny jeans and pointy beige brogues, toting a reusable shopping bag and tirelessly attempting to strike up conversation with his fellow clubbers – AKA audience members – by giving out lighters, offering to provide assistance at their next house party or proving his macho status by telling them how he’d deal with the boy in Adolescence if he was the psychiatrist sent to interview him (swiftly and violently). It’s a zillennial update on the deeply British antihero you’re primed to root for and recoil from in equal measure.

Working behind bars honed Meredith’s devastating observational comedy about uncomfortable men trying to fit in (“you get so much more material from these sorts of jobs than you ever would just sitting at home”). So did looking at people in the background of TV programmes. Need a Light? features a riff on the men placed at the rear of the Top Gear studio audience: people “trying their best to have a good time. There’s something really pure about that energy.” He has always been fascinated by the “guy behind the guy” – men on the peripheries – and recently started thinking more about the isolated, impressionable types who try to channel masculinity in misguided ways, such as the Peaky Blinders devotees or those who fall prey to manosphere influencers. Meredith personally finds the content “really funny and it’s kind of feeding this comedy vehicle, but if you don’t have the tools to not recognise that as being quite problematic, then you might just be like, wow, sick!”

Luckily, Need a Light? ends on a wholesome high, as our genuinely sweet (if incredibly irritating) hero achieves the camaraderie he craves. Yet Meredith has also been mining the manosphere theme elsewhere. He was part of the writers’ room for Sharon Horgan’s new HBO dramedy Youth, drafted in specifically to flesh out the character of her teenage son – played by Cillian Murphy’s son Aran – who flirts with such ideology (“They were looking for an incel consultant,” he jokes). He also ended up getting a role written for him: a blundering intern at the literary agency where Horgan’s character works. “They were like: there’s this part, we’re just calling him Freddie. He’s a complete idiot.”

Which means that the week we speak, Meredith is on HBO, live on Sky and in residence at London’s Soho theatre. In the next couple of days, his intense schedule will involve writing and performing sketches with SNL UK guest host Danny Dyer by day, before travelling into town to perform Need a Light? in the evenings. On top of that, Meredith is still learning the SNL ropes: while the rest of the cast had six weeks to get up to speed before going into production, he’s having to catch up in real time. Not that he minds – in fact, he is relishing the manic pace of long-awaited success. “You spend so long not working as an actor,” he says. “There’s something to be said for doing it all.”