Ben Schwartz American Actor Born 1981 in The Bronx

Early life

Benjamin Joseph Schwartz was born on 15 September 1981 in the Bronx, New York City, and spent his first years in the Riverdale neighbourhood. At eleven his family relocated to Edgemont, in neighbouring Westchester County, where he attended Edgemont Junior-Senior High School. He played basketball, sang in the school chorus and graduated in 1999. He went on to Union College, finishing in 2003 with a double major in psychology and anthropology.

Career

Schwartz trained in improvisation at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and performed there in a group called Hot Sauce, which staged a monthly long-form show. Alongside performing, he wrote for comedy. He was a staff writer on the third season of the Adult Swim series Robot Chicken, contributed freelance material to the Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live and helped write monologues for the Late Show with David Letterman. He also became a familiar face online, appearing repeatedly in the CollegeHumor web series Jake and Amir and fronting his own segment, Terrible Decisions with Ben Schwartz, on HBO's Funny or Die Presents.

His first film credit on record is Everybody's Fine in 2009, followed by Peep World in 2010. That same year he played series regular Bill Hoyt in the NBC spy drama Undercovers. He is best known on television for two parts: the recurring Jean-Ralphio Saperstein in Parks and Recreation, and Clyde Oberholt in the Showtime series House of Lies. In 2013 he was reported to have been hired by Paramount Pictures to remake the comedy Soapdish as a Latin telenovela, and he also sold an original pitch to Universal.

The mid-2010s brought supporting film work, including The Interview and This Is Where I Leave You in 2014, where he played a rabbi nicknamed Boner, and The Walk in 2015. On Star Wars: The Force Awakens he served as a vocal consultant with Bill Hader and also played a Stormtrooper. Much of his voice work began in this period. He voiced Randy Cunningham in Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, then Dewey Duck in the Disney XD revival of DuckTales from 2017 and Leonardo in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In August 2018 he was announced as the voice of the title character in the feature film Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 2020. He returned for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the latter in 2024. In 2019 he was cast as F. Tony Scarapiducci in the Netflix comedy Space Force, which ran from 2020 to 2022. In April 2020 he and fellow comedian Thomas Middleditch starred in Middleditch and Schwartz, a three-part Netflix improv special filmed at New York University's Skirball Center.

He joined the main cast of the Apple TV+ mystery comedy The Afterparty in 2022 and appeared as a guest in its second season the following year. In 2023 he lent his voice to the droid TAY-0 in Star Wars: The Bad Batch and appeared in the film Renfield. Other film roles include Standing Up, Falling Down, in which he co-starred with Billy Crystal, as well as Flora & Ulysses in 2021. His latest credit on record is Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, dated 2026.

Podcasts form a separate strand of his work. Since 2014 he has returned to the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast for a series of solo episodes with the "Solo Bolo" title, in which he and host Scott Aukerman usually compete in an Olympic song challenge. He has also guested on shows such as If I Were You, You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes and Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. On stage he has toured as Ben Schwartz & Friends, with guests including Colton Dunn and Drew Tarver.

Schwartz has also written books. He co-wrote three illustrated humour titles with Amanda McCall, among them Grandma's Dead: Breaking Bad News with Baby Animals and Maybe Your Leg Will Grow Back!, and a fourth, about dating, with Laura Moses.

Recognition

Schwartz won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2009 for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, shared for co-writing the opening number performed by Hugh Jackman at the 81st Academy Awards. He has been nominated for Emmys on four occasions in total.