Richard Ayoade
Richard Ayoade
Richard Ellef Ayoadeis an English actor, comedian, writer, director and television presenter. He is best known as Maurice Moss in The IT Crowd – for which he won the 2014 BAFTA for Best Male Comedy Performance – and as Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. He has directed films including Submarine, The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg, and various music videos for bands including Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Kasabian...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth12 June 1977
CityLondon, England
Richard Ayoade quotes about
I actually prefer night shoots to days. I prefer being up. It's easier for me. I'm more of a night person.
A lot of comedies are based on the reaction shot. You have one person doing something stupid and one person is generally the straight man, and the laughs generally come on the reaction of the straight man to the funny thing the other person has done.
When I do plays in New York and do eight shows a week, you have the same feeling. Three of them are terrible, four of them are okay and one is really good. It's hard to say what accounts for the really good one or for the terrible ones, but you end up trying to remanufacture whatever worked for the good one, like eating a tomato. I ate a tomato and the show was good, but that of course is not how it works.
To be in a video is a ridiculous thing. It's almost impossible to do it without any humour
A writer/director is a tough thing to gauge when someone hasn't directed a movie before. You just don't know. Sometimes it will be a great script that's written beautifully, and then the director who has also written it does not have the facility to translate it.
I've always felt that actors in my experience have a very good and accurate instinct about whether something feels right or not. They just have a sense because they have to literally do it.
The most interesting part of filming is what the actors do. That's the primary link between the story and the audience.
American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.