Mackenzie Crook

Paul Mackenzie Crook (born 29 September 1971) is an English actor and comedian. He is best known for playing Gareth Keenan in The Office, Ragetti in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and Orell in Game of Thrones. --- Paul Mackenzie Crook was born in Maidstone, Kent, 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. In the summers he spent time with his uncle at his tobacco farm in northern Zimbabwe, where he developed his love for painting. He was educated at the Wilmington Grammar School for Boys, where he was the illustrator and cartoonist for the school magazine, Orion. He joined the Orchard Youth Theatre in Dartford when he was about 15 years old. 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 publisher's, a hospital, Halford's 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 from Chorley". He has also performed, both on stage and in the Channel 4 sketch show Barking, as a grotesque schoolteacher called Mr. Bagshaw who is said to be based on a variety of obnoxious, overbearing science teachers he was taught by while in school. In 1996 Crook appeared in his first 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 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. --- Crook and his wife Lindsay, a former advertising executive, reside in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill, in a semi-detached house formerly belonging to Peter Sellers. Crook and his wife were married in April 2001, and have a son, Jude Michael, born 17 January 2003, and a daughter, Scout Elizabeth, born 24 December 2007.