From Hamlet at the Globe to Keir Starmer on SNL UK: the anarchic rise of George Fouracres

After years of skits and Shakespeare, the Black Country performer has found his biggest audience yet on Saturday Night Live UK. Phil Wang and others hail his ‘pure comedic instinct’ 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 maste