Jools Holland as a demon<\/a> who appears if you don\u2019t put your clocks forward). An SNL rep tells me producers \u201cdon\u2019t provide comments on individual castings\u201d, meaning there\u2019s no official word on the reason behind Meredith\u2019s last-minute addition (they didn\u2019t 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 \u2013 disconcertingly awkward men who cleave to a quintessentially British cringe-comedy heritage (your David Brents, your Alan Partridges) \u2013 had no representative in the cast before.<\/p>\nMeredith 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\u2019 Restoration-set play about the Earl of Rochester (\u201ccrazy play to do at school\u201d). The performance was \u201cprobably the most fun\u201d he\u2019d 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 \u2013 yet in his early career he was being put up for the kind of roles that \u201clet\u2019s say, James Norton is doing now. That I\u2019m never, ever going to get in a million years because it\u2019s leading-man stuff. People didn\u2019t really understand who I was.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Seb in Such Brave Girls. Photograph: Vishal Sharma\/BBC\/Various Artists Ltd<\/p>\n
At a loose end during lockdown, he decided to show them. A longtime comedy enthusiast \u2013 in his teens he\u2019d seen Tim Key perform and \u201claughed so much; I\u2019d never seen anything that really properly spoke to me before\u201d \u2013 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 \u201cseemed to find its way through to my comedy heroes\u201d 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 \u2013 what are the chances? \u2013 Key himself.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A deeply British antihero \u2026 Freddie Meredith in Need a Light? at the Edinburgh fringe. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 AKA audience members \u2013 by giving out lighters, offering to provide assistance at their next house party or proving his macho status by telling them how he\u2019d deal with the boy in Adolescence if he was the psychiatrist sent to interview him (swiftly and violently). It\u2019s a zillennial update on the deeply British antihero you\u2019re primed to root for and recoil from in equal measure.<\/p>\n
Working behind bars honed Meredith\u2019s devastating observational comedy about uncomfortable men trying to fit in (\u201cyou get so much more material from these sorts of jobs than you ever would just sitting at home\u201d). 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 \u201ctrying their best to have a good time. There\u2019s something really pure about that energy.\u201d He has always been fascinated by the \u201cguy behind the guy\u201d \u2013 men on the peripheries \u2013 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 \u201creally funny and it\u2019s kind of feeding this comedy vehicle, but if you don\u2019t have the tools to not recognise that as being quite problematic, then you might just be like, wow, sick!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019 room for Sharon Horgan\u2019s new HBO dramedy Youth<\/a>, drafted in specifically to flesh out the character of her teenage son \u2013 played by Cillian Murphy\u2019s son Aran \u2013 who flirts with such ideology (\u201cThey were looking for an incel consultant,\u201d he jokes). He also ended up getting a role written for him: a blundering intern at the literary agency where Horgan\u2019s character works. \u201cThey were like: there\u2019s this part, we\u2019re just calling him Freddie. He\u2019s a complete idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n\u2018Y\u2019awright, our kid, yeh?\u2019 \u2026 Meredith as Liam Gallagher on SNL UK.<\/p>\n
Which means that the week we speak, Meredith is on HBO, live on Sky and in residence at London\u2019s 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\u2019s having to catch up in real time. Not that he minds \u2013 in fact, he is relishing the manic pace of long-awaited success. \u201cYou spend so long not working as an actor,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s something to be said for doing it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saturday Night Live UK is on Sky One and Now; Youth is on HBO Max. Freddie Meredith: Need a Light? is at Soho Theatre from 9 to 14 November and at Fairfield Social Club in Manchester on 19 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Until a few weeks ago, Freddie Meredith\u2019s IMDb page was full of names like \u201cSeb\u201d and \u201cGeorge\u201d and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-652081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}