Acting
Matthew Holness
Whitstable, Kent, England
Born in Whitstable, Kent in 1975, Matthew Holness is an English comedian, actor, writer and director. He is best known for his comic creation, the fictional horror novelist Garth Marenghi. He read English at Trinity College, Cambridge and was vice-president of the Cambridge Footlights. His contemporaries included Footlights president, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Olivia Colman and his Marenghi co-writer Richard Ayoade. Holness first appeared on television as a cast-member of the 2000 BBC Choice TV series Bruiser, which starred Mitchell, Webb, Colman and Martin Freeman. In that same year he won the Perrier at the Edinburgh Fringe for Garty Marenghi's Fright Night, which was transferred to UK television in the guise of the 2004 Channel 4 horror comedy Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Other credits include 2006's Man to Man with Dean Learner, several productions with Ricky Gervais such as The Office, Life's Too Short and Cemetery Junction, and the 2017 Channel 4 sitcom Back which starred Mitchell and Webb. In 2018 he made his feature length directorial debut with the film Possum, having previously helmed short films The Snipist and A Gun For George.
Acting credits
6.5In 1970s England, three blue-collar friends spend their days joking, drinking, fighting and chasing girls. Freddie wants to leave their working-class world but cool, charismatic Bruce and lovable loser Snork are happy with life the way it is. When Freddie gets a new job as a door-to-door salesman and bumps into his old school sweetheart Julie, the gang are forced to make choices that will change their lives for ever.
Cemetery Junction
2010
7.8With exclusive interviews and outtakes, this anniversary special celebrates a decade of Robert Popper's iconic comedy, from celebrity fans to Paul Ritter's infamous squirrel-based catchphrase
Friday Night Dinner: 10 Years and a Lovely Bit of Squirrel
2021
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Horrificata Illuminata
2006
Documentary of the 1997 Footlights, the theatrical club of Cambridge University.
Backstage... at the Cambridge Footlights
1997
6.0'Festival' is a black comedy set during the annual Edinburgh Fringe festival. The film is based around both the judging of a major comedy award and the performers at one of the smaller venues. Various plot strands interweave, including the bitter relationship between a famous self-obsessed British comic and his ever-suffering assistant, an actress debuting at the festival with a one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth and a depressed, rich housewife who spies on the stoned Canadian theatre troupe to whom she has rented out her house
Festival
2005
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Darkplace Illuminatum
2006
NRWhen a heist goes wrong, Dodger is given his harshest punishment yet - school!
Dodger Special: Bad Egg
2023
NRMatthew Holness, writer and star of cult television series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, offers up an appreciation of Milano Calibro 9 and the Italian poliziotteschi sub-genre
Italia Violenta
2015
7.3Author Terry Finch struggles to find an outlet that will stock or reprint his violent pulp crime series "The Reprisalizer"
A Gun for George
2011
Behind the camera
6.2A disgraced children's puppeteer returns to his childhood home and is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured him his entire life.
Possum
2018
6.2A disgraced children's puppeteer returns to his childhood home and is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured him his entire life.
Possum
2018
9.0The struggle of a lone sniper in a dystopian future Britain plagued with rabies and ruled over by a sinistrous Ministry of Information.
The Snipist
2012
9.0The struggle of a lone sniper in a dystopian future Britain plagued with rabies and ruled over by a sinistrous Ministry of Information.
The Snipist
2012
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Horrificata Illuminata
2006
NRNo synopsis available yet.
Darkplace Illuminatum
2006
7.3Author Terry Finch struggles to find an outlet that will stock or reprint his violent pulp crime series "The Reprisalizer"
A Gun for George
2011
7.3Author Terry Finch struggles to find an outlet that will stock or reprint his violent pulp crime series "The Reprisalizer"
A Gun for George
2011