| Chris Parnell | |
|---|---|
Parnell at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007 |
|
| Born | Thomas Christopher Parnell February 5, 1967 Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor/Comedian |
| Years active | 1987–present |
Thomas Christopher "Chris" Parnell (born February 5, 1967) is an American comic actor best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1998–2006 and for his role as Dr. Leo Spaceman on NBC's Emmy Award-winning comedy series 30 Rock. Parnell currently voices Cyril Figgis on the FX animated comedy Archer and appears with a recurring role on the ABC sitcom Suburgatory.
Contents |
Parnell was born to and raised by a Southern Baptist family in Memphis, Tennessee. He graduated from Germantown High School and later attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts where he received his BFA in Drama. After graduating, Parnell moved back to Tennessee and taught acting and film at his former high school. With a strong passion for performing, Parnell eventually moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. While in Los Angeles he began performing with The Groundlings where he was eventually discovered by Saturday Night Live.
After performing as a company player with The Groundlings for a number of years, Parnell was hired to join the cast of Saturday Night Live as a featured player on September 26, 1998, and was promoted to repertory player the following season. In the summer of 2001, budget cuts and hiring four new cast members required Lorne Michaels to dismiss two cast members; he chose to lay off Parnell and Jerry Minor over Horatio Sanz, Rachel Dratch, and Maya Rudolph, but he was rehired in the middle of the next season.
While on SNL, Parnell appeared in numerous sketches, and commercial parodies, and performed memorable impressions of various celebrities. One of his most popular sketches is Lazy Sunday, a rap video he shot with Andy Samberg about buying cupcakes and going to see The Chronicles of Narnia. He has also performed raps about hosts Jennifer Garner, Britney Spears, Kirsten Dunst and Ashton Kutcher.
In the summer of 2006, Lorne Michaels announced that four cast members would be fired due to budget cuts, but he did not say who.[1] On September 22, 2006 it was announced that three cast members had been fired: Parnell, Horatio Sanz, and Finesse Mitchell. This effectively made him the only SNL performer to have been fired twice by Lorne Michaels, though Parnell did say in a 2008 interview with The Sound of Young America podcast that he was okay with being let go this time, because he was considering leaving after that season anyway, but added that he probably would have stayed one last season if he was asked back. He had been with SNL for eight seasons; at the time only four people (Darrell Hammond, Tim Meadows, Kevin Nealon, and Al Franken) had been cast members longer. He has since made uncredited cameo appearances on the show, most recently in 2008 parodying newscasters Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, and Bob Schieffer.
Parnell and his former SNL castmate Horatio Sanz recently starred together in Big Lake, a 2010 sitcom on Comedy Central from executive producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.
Parnell is currently a series regular on the FX animated series Archer and makes recurring guest appearances on 30 Rock and Suburgatory.