Michel Estime
Michel Estime is an actor.
One very good recurring part is what Michel Estime is known for, and it earns the attention. As Risky in Everybody Hates Chris, the street entrepreneur with an angle for everything, he had the show's most dependable running joke and one of the few characters allowed to be funny without also being sad. That is a part that outlives most leads.
The rest is a working comic's resume. He came up through the BET stand-up circuit on Comic View, took film roles in Last Holiday in 2006 and in Harbinger Down, and did the sitcom Talk to Me. More recently he has appeared in the current generation of network and streaming comedies, an episode of The Neighborhood in 2021 and a part on The Upshaws, which is a direct descendant of the shows he came up on.
The nicest detail on the page is that he was brought back for the animated revival, Everybody Still Hates Chris, in 2024. Very few supporting players from a mid-2000s sitcom get asked back two decades later, and it says something about how that show remembers its supporting bench.
Movies (2)
TV (4)
Where to start with Michel Estime
Everybody Hates Chris is the only real answer here, and it holds up better than almost any sitcom of its decade: a narrated family comedy about growing up broke in the 1980s, sharp about money in a way American network television rarely manages. Estime's Risky turns up throughout and is worth waiting for.
From there, Everybody Still Hates Chris is the 2024 animated continuation, far more faithful in tone than these revivals usually are. Last Holiday is the mainstream film credit, a warm studio comedy in which he has a small part, and The Upshaws and The Neighborhood are the recent network sitcom appearances. Three Colors: Pan-African in 2026 is the outlier, and its credit list, which has him playing six separate people, tells you roughly what kind of production it is.