Hannah Simone British Actress Known for New Girl

Early life

Hannah Simone was born on 3 August 1980. Her father is British Indian and her mother is British, with German, Italian and Greek Cypriot ancestry. She has a brother named Zack. Her first years were spent in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, and between the ages of seven and ten she moved across three continents, attending school on each of them. By the time she was thirteen she was living in Cyprus and working as a fashion model. At sixteen she lived in New Delhi, where she went to the American Embassy School. A year later she returned to Canada, settling first in White Rock, British Columbia, and then in Vancouver, where she studied at the University of British Columbia.

After her first degree she spent a year in London working as a human rights and refugees officer for the United Nations. She later graduated from Ryerson University, now called Toronto Metropolitan University, in 2005.

Career

Simone began in broadcasting. After graduating she hosted the first season of Space for Living, a home-design programme on HGTV Canada. She then joined MuchMusic in Canada, where she worked as a video jockey from May 2006 until November 2008. Her duties there included presenting the news segment Much News Weekly, hosting the show The NewMusic and interviewing musicians and bands. She then said she planned to move to Los Angeles.

Her first listed screen credit is the Syfy gaming competition series WCG Ultimate Gamer, which she co-hosted with Joel Gourdin. It premiered on 10 March 2009 and finished after its second season on 7 October 2010.

Her most prominent acting role came in the Fox sitcom New Girl, in which she played Cece Parikh and appeared opposite Zooey Deschanel. The series ran from 2011 to 2018. During those years she took part in a Gillette advertising campaign in 2013 called "What Women Want", appearing alongside Kate Upton and Génesis Rodríguez. In 2014 she featured with Danny Trejo in the music video for Train's "Angel in Blue Jeans", and in 2016 she appeared in the video for "Same Air" by The Rocket Summer. She also hosted the reality competition series Kicking & Screaming in 2017.

Her film credits include Flock of Dudes (2015), Killing Gunther (2017) and Band Aid (2017), as well as The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience (2019). In 2026 she appeared in Super Troopers 3. On 12 February 2018 ABC announced her as the lead of its planned reboot of The Greatest American Hero, but the network chose not to pick up the series.

In January 2022 she began co-hosting Welcome to Our Show, a podcast in which she and her New Girl castmates Lamorne Morris and Zooey Deschanel revisit episodes of the series. It is distributed by iHeartRadio.

Public roles

Beyond acting, Simone has built a profile as a television and podcast host. Her presenting work covers music television at MuchMusic, home design at HGTV Canada, a gaming contest on Syfy and the reality series Kicking & Screaming. Her Instagram account had roughly 1.39 million followers as of October 2026.