Matt King makes disreputable characters funny by playing them without embarrassment. We rate his knack for surprising us without labouring the joke, though Super Hans remains the clearest reason to seek him out.
Fi1m perspective
Super Hans does not appear to think his behaviour needs much explaining. In Peep Show (2003), Matt King gives him an ease that is especially funny beside David Mitchell and Robert Webb, whose Mark and Jeremy keep finding excuses for themselves. We laughed at his indifference to seeming reasonable: King lets the oddness pass without asking us to applaud it. That matters in Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's comedy, where the central pair's embarrassment can become exhausting. King gives the programme someone who can surprise us without going through the same anxious preparations.
King came to television after years of stand-up in Australia, and his work widened into sketches and impersonations. Star Stories (2006) had him playing figures including Elton John and Guy Ritchie. Ritchie then cast him as Cookie in RocknRolla (2008), one of the supporting film parts that followed. Writing on Whites (2010), drawing on his experience as a chef, also took him beyond performing somebody else's lines. The temptation to treat Super Hans as the whole job misses quite a bit of work.
Bronson (2009) gives him a different comic manner, and the change is welcome. As Paul Daniels, King is camp in a film so firmly built around Tom Hardy's threatening performance. Nicolas Winding Refn's fascination with his central figure starts to wear thin, whatever the strength of the acting. Larry Smith's still compositions and Matthew Newman's shifts between waiting and attack keep the threat alive; King offers relief from it. His part cannot cure the film's repetitive attention to one man, but it does show how much a supporting actor can do to vary an evening's company.
The difficulty is that Super Hans has become a casting obstacle: King's association with the part has made other work harder to secure. We would not mistake that familiarity for proof that he has nothing else to offer. Nor would we make the opposite claim on the strength of a handful of supporting parts. Start with Peep Show, where there is time to appreciate how precisely King makes unreasonable behaviour seem routine.
Biography
Matt King is an English actor and comedian. He is best known for his role as Super Hans in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show (2003–2015).
Born in Watford in 1968, King worked as a chef and stand-up comedian in Australia for 15 years before returning to the UK. He has appeared in Star Stories, his own sketch show Dogface, Look Around You, Skins (2007) as Cook Senior, Doctor Who (2007) as Peter Streete, and Jekyll. Film roles include RocknRolla (2008) as Cookie, Bronson (2009) as Paul Daniels and Inkheart (2008) as Cockerell. He wrote the BBC sitcom Whites.
