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A cast of unknowns, they keep saying about Saturday Night Live UK, whose success we’ve all been toasting this last seven days. But many of its stars have been known to comedy- and theatre-watchers for years, none more so than breakout star George Fouracres, he of the viral “What kind of Irish is your grandad?” video and of put-upon Keir Starmer cowering by his hotline to Trump. Over the last decade, Fouracres, 36, has made waves as a sketch comic, a solo performer and a Shakespearean actor at the Globe – playing Hamlet, no less. “To everyone who’s known George since he started performing,” says his old sketch partner, the standup Phil Wang, “this week has been no surprise at all. It was just a matter of time before everyone got to see how talented he is.”
I first encountered Fouracres in 2015 alongside Wang and Jason Forbes as one-third of Daphne, the then-latest – but highly distinctive – sketch group off the Cambridge Footlights production line. “From the beginning,” says Wang, “he had this real mastery of comedic timing, tone and just pure comedic instinct. I’d write parts for him at university” – including Long John Silver in a Footlights panto – “and the first time he read it out he got it if not exactly how I’d imagined it, then better than I’d imagined it. He just has this instinct for funny.” With Daphne, whose success on the fringe led to a Radio 4 series, Fouracres always drew the eye (or ear), a combustible performer from whom (whether as a pirate, a ruthless Willy Wonka or an unhinged northerner parody of Daphne from Frasier) you never quite knew what was coming next.
Says Wang: “George moves at a glacial pace in his normal life, but once he’s onstage he just explodes. He’s this huge source of energy, and all this stuff just flows out of him, into every character he inhabits. It’s extraordinary.” But Fouracres showed another side of himself with the project that followed Daphne, Gentlemon, a one-person paean to his working-class heritage in the Black Country. Away from the firecracker comedy performer, here was a more contemplative writer/performer thinking deeply about class and culture and wearing his heartfelt sense of belonging on his sleeve.
By this stage, Fouracres had come into the orbit of theatre director – and associate artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe – Sean Holmes, for whom he went on to play a succession of comic and dramatic roles: Puck, one of the Dromios, even (an unusually fresh-faced) Falstaff. “I’m glad George is getting attention,” says Holmes today, “because he’s a bit of a genius. Particularly given that he didn’t train as an actor, I just think he’s extraordinary. He’s one of the cleverest people you’ll ever meet, but he’s got an incredibly alive intelligence. So it feels as if there’s a direct connection back 400 years to what those Shakespeare clowns or characters are doing.”
Holmes admits that the Hamlet he made with Fouracres was an acquired taste. But many onlookers identified the comic turned actor as one to keep an eye on, with Time Out London calling the show “a wild, wild ride, that shows Fouracres to be a major star”. Says Holmes: “If you call somebody Shakespearean, actually what that is, is somebody who’s really mutable, who can switch between extremes, who’s really in the moment, who’s generous and passionate and ferociously intelligent. And daft and silly. And George has got those combinations. And he’s also a sponge for learning.”
You might think after Hamlet, the only way is down, but not for Fouracres, whose next role, however improbably, was as “king of the musi-cool” Andrew Lloyd Webber in the double act Flo & Joan’s once-seen, never-forgotten musical about the composer’s life. That the show was brutally satirical and strangely tender was due in no small degree to Fouracres’ gale-force performance as Lloyd Webber – an oddball character with whom he clearly identified.
Speaking about the show last year, Flo & Joan – AKA Nicola and Rosie Dempsey – described Fouracres as “an amazing comedian [and] this phenomenal actor as well”. Having cried for joy when they first watched his audition tape, “as soon as we met him,” said Nicola, “we knew George could deliver something so much more interesting than the thing we were originally writing. [The show] just wouldn’t work if George wasn’t an incredible actor who can bring all of those different qualities to a human being.”
With SNL UK, Fouracres is finally finding a mass audience for this expansive if loose-cannon talent, with his anarchic energy being likened on social media to that of SNL originator, the legendary John Belushi. With seven more episodes to come, other members of the show’s multi-skilled cast will get their chance to step into sharper focus. But off the back of an already eye-catching and distinctive career, no one can begrudge George Fouracres his moment – the first, you’d think, of many – in the spotlight.
