Jemaine Clement

Jemaine Clement's comic register is Wellington deadpan: a low, slow delivery that lets an absurd sentence land as though it were entirely reasonable. He and Bret McKenzie built Flight of the Conchords as a musical comedy act first, releasing albums, then turned it into a television series for the BBC and HBO about two New Zealanders failing to make it in New York. It collected six Primetime Emmy nominations and it works because neither man ever plays for sympathy.

What We Do in the Shadows is the larger achievement. Clement co-wrote, co-directed and co-starred with Taika Waititi in 2014, taking flatshare comedy and vampires and refusing to treat either half as a joke that needs explaining. He then developed it into the FX series and, in Wellington Paranormal, a police procedural spun out of a couple of minutes of the film. That is a remarkable amount of franchise to build from one very cheap movie.

As a performer for hire he is mostly a voice, and a lucrative one: Nigel the cockatoo in the Rio films, Tamatoa in Moana, Sauron in The Lego Batman Movie, Boris the Animal under heavy prosthetics in Men in Black 3, and Dr Garvin in the Avatar sequels. The pattern is consistent. Give him a villain who is vain rather than frightening and he will find several more laughs in it than the script contains. He also created the 2024 Time Bandits series, which suggests the appetite for building things has not faded.