Jemaine Clement

Jemaine Clement was born on January 10, 1974, in Wellington, New Zealand, and he's spent the better part of three decades building one of the more genuinely unpredictable careers in contemporary screen comedy. Most audiences know him first through Flight of the Conchords — the HBO series he co-created and starred in alongside Bret McKenzie — where he played a fictionalized version of himself: a deadpan, romantically hopeless New Zealand musician trying to make it in New York. That show ran from 2007 to 2009 and didn't just find an audience; it built a cult following that still feels unusually devoted, the kind of fans who can quote the songs verbatim.

The Conchords work was the breakthrough, but what it demonstrated wasn't just comic timing — it was a specific kind of restraint. Clement plays characters who don't know they're funny. That quality, the absolute commitment to a bit without a wink at the camera, is what made his performance in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) so effective. The mockumentary — which he co-wrote and co-directed with Taika Waititi — follows a flat of vampire flatmates in Wellington, and Clement's Vladislav is a centuries-old creature of darkness who's still a little wounded about a past relationship. It's a remarkable piece of comic construction, and the film's success eventually spawned both an American TV series and a spinoff, though Clement's direct involvement in those iterations has been more limited.

What's striking is how consistently Clement has gravitated toward genre — not to subvert it exactly, but to inhabit it so earnestly that the comedy becomes a byproduct of belief rather than mockery. He doesn't play villains like he's in on the joke. His work in animated features follows the same logic: voice roles that lean into the grandiosity of the character without tipping into self-parody. The thing nobody mentions is how physically specific his performances are — even when he's doing voice work, there's a sense that his whole body is involved somehow, that the voice is coming from a real place rather than a recording booth performance.

In Men in Black 3 (2012), Clement played Boris the Animal — a one-armed alien prisoner with a serious grudge and a small creature living in his hand. The role could have been throwaway franchise filler, but Clement committed to the menace with a kind of focused weirdness that made Boris genuinely unsettling in a film that wasn't really asking for that. Hard to say if the filmmakers expected that level of investment, but it's there. More recently, he appeared in Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024), the live-action adaptation of the children's book, taking on a role that placed him in a very different register — lighter, more overtly family-friendly, the sort of project that signals a performer comfortable moving across tonal registers without needing to anchor every film in the same corner of the genre map.

Clement's career doesn't follow a conventional arc of escalating stardom — and that seems deliberate (or at least consistent with how he's operated from the start). He returns to New Zealand projects, maintains creative partnerships, and tends to show up in films where the material itself is doing something slightly odd. The What We Do in the Shadows universe continues to expand, and his fingerprints remain on that world even when he's not on screen. At fifty, he occupies a particular space in the industry: someone whose name carries real weight with a specific audience, who can anchor an independent comedy or add texture to a studio tentpole, and who hasn't really chased the version of success that would require him to stop doing the stranger things. That's not nothing.