Mackenzie Crook
Mackenzie Crook
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, searchPaul Mackenzie Crook (born 29 September 1971) is a British actor and comedian. He is known for playing Gareth Keenan in The Office and Ragetti in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
Biography
Paul Mackenzie Crook was born in Maidstone, Kent, England, and grew up in Dartford. His father, Michael Crook, worked for British Airways and his mother, Sheila, was a hospital manager. He has two sisters. As a child he was put on a course of hormone therapy for three years due to a growth hormone deficiency.
Aged 10, Crook discovered the thrill of performance when dominating an end-of-year school variety show with magic tricks and comedy gags. Then educated at the Wilmington Grammar School for Boys, He joined the Orchard Youth Theatre in Dartford when he was about 15 years old. In the summers he spent time with his uncle at his tobacco farm in Northern Zimbabwe, where he developed his love for painting.
His favourite musicians are Nick Drake and Kurt Cobain.
Early career
Wanting to be a graphic artist, aged 18 he applied and was turned down three times for courses at the Kent Institute of Art & Design. He spent a while doing part-time jobs in a publishers, a hospital, Halfords, and Pizza Hut.
Persuaded to join a local theatre company by its manager, he was guided to turn to comedic arts, resulting in Crook writing comedy sketches and the theatre manager becoming his agent. He then became a standup comedian alongside Iain Lee for about eight years, in the guise of Charlie Cheese, "the cheeky chirpy chappy Charlie from Chorley".He has also performed as a grotesque schoolteacher called Mr. Bagshaw, who is said to be based on a variety of obnoxious, overbearing Science teachers he was tutored by while in school.
Film and television career
In 1996 Crook appeared in his first a short film: The Man who Fell in Love with a Traffic Cone.
Having been seen by Bob Mortimer in his one-man show in Edinburgh, alongside others including Sacha Baron Cohen they were offered their first major television roles was as comedy sketch contributors on Channel 4's The Eleven O'Clock Show in 1998, from which Crook was quietly dropped. He was later a member of the main cast of the BBC sketch show TV to Go in 2001.
In 2001, he auditioned for the role of Gareth Keenan in Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant popular mockumentary The Office. Written originally for a larger thuggish actor, Crook won the role and by the end of the series in 2003 had earned
