It’s mid-morning in a cosy, subterranean dressing room below London’s Television Centre and Jack Shep is sitting cross-legged on his sofa telling me some fake news. The comic has a habit of creating hoax press about himself, including a bogus New York Times review of his Edinburgh Fringe show. So when he got his current gig – star cast member on the £2 million-per-episode Saturday Night Live UK, the first season of which reaches its triumphant climax this month and it’s second season freshly renewed and returning in September – no one believed him.
This time last year, the 26-year-old was working as a football coach for toddlers when he auditioned for SNL UK. When the British iteration of the American format was announced, the noise was that it would flop. It hasn’t. Ratings are strong, reviews even stronger and at the centre of its early success is Shep, whose now-infamous Diana, Princess of Wales impression in episode one was an instant hit. “Having people have a reaction to anything you do is great,” he says. “And I know in my heart that Princess Diana would be thrilled by a homosexual man playing her. You just know she would have been a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.”
You might already recognise him. Before prime time, Shep built a following on TikTok – posting absurd mini-skits, from Victorian children being introduced to hyperpop to performative “gentle parenting”. Or perhaps you’ve caught his comedy nights – “Wanting to be Cool, Having to be Funny” – which pop up across London in whichever venue he can book.
He’s always been funny. Ask him something vaguely earnest and he’ll wipe away a fake tear; push further and he’ll shrug. He doesn’t remember much of his time in a childhood production of Cats, he says, because he “was really drunk back then”. Wit was a defence mechanism growing up as a queer boy in Bedfordshire. “I remember this kid at my school being like, ‘We’re not laughing with you. We’re laughing at you,’” he recalls. Then adds that he’d clap back with something: “quite nasty and, of course, genius”.
Now the world is his and our conversation ends imagining a deepfake Vogue headline together. He thinks for a moment. “I’m Not Going Back, No One Can Make Me: Jack Shep Talks About His Time On The Scientology Cruise.”
Main look: wool jacket, cotton shirt, leather jeans, and leather loafers, Loewe. Grooming: Mary-Jane Gotidoc. Production: Phoebe Asker.
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