Kevin Murphy (actor)
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For other people with similar names, see Kevin Murphy.
Kevin Wagner Murphy (born November 3, 1956 in River Forest, Illinois) is a United States actor and puppeteer. For eleven years he was a writer for the Peabody Award-winning comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, for nine of those years playing and operating Tom Servo, one of the show's puppet characters. During the final three years of the series he additionally portrayed Professor Bobo, a talking mountain gorilla in the style of Planet of the Apes. After taking over the role of Servo, an anonymous person sent him a six-foot long banner that read "I HATE TOM SERVO'S NEW VOICE." Flattered by the enormous amount of effort taken to heckle him, Murphy hung the banner in his office for over a year.
After the end of MST3K, Murphy spent the year 2001 going to a different movie every day (including September 11) and wrote a book about this experience, entitled A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey (ISBN 0-06-093786-6). During his year at the movies, Murphy samples theaters from small-town boxes to urban megaplexes, attempts (and rejects) a theater food diet, suffers a kidney stone, visits both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, sneaks Thanksgiving dinner into a showing of Monsters, Inc., and records all of these experiences, both good and bad. His feat — viewing 360+ films on four continents — was mentioned in Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Murphy holds a B.A. in Journalism and an M.A. in Directing for the Stage and Screen, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Murphy lives in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area with his wife, Jane.
In 2006, Murphy joined Michael J. Nelson on several audio commentaries for Nelson's RiffTrax service.
