Shortly after Jack Shep made his debut as one of the first ever cast members on Saturday Night Live UK, his face – albeit in full Princess Diana drag – was everywhere.
Shep’s coquettish take on the late royal, complete with blonde bouffant and uncanny head tilt, became the show’s first viral meme, his doe-eyed look down the barrel of the camera quickly becoming the image of the burgeoning SNL UK. Sky even capitalised on Shep’s moment by rolling out promotional posters of the moment across London Tube stations. In the days after the premiere, he quite literally became the people’s princess.
“A group of lads shouted ‘Diana!’ at me in the street. They were like, ‘Wheyyy, Dianaaa!’” Shep tells me, slipping into a blokeish imitation of these unlikely fans before going back to speaking with his distinctive London-esque vocal fry. “I was tucking my hair behind my ear. That was fun – and hot.”
Shep was one of the lesser-known cast members within its lineup of up-and-comers – finding TikTok success with his observational, Gen Z-focused sketches and bit parts on One Day and Big Boys. That immediately changed after the first episode. With his infectious grin, giddy energy and Zoomer-esque mannerisms, Shep is a true scene-stealer and a certified SNL breakout star.
Aside from Diana, we’ve seen the 26-year-old play a blood-splattered waiter, a rowdy Brit abroad, a giant dormouse and the royal formerly known as Prince Andrew on the Sky show, but on the mild Wednesday morning in April we meet, he’s just Jack Shep – effortlessly and intimidatingly cool, funny (obviously) and surprisingly more reserved than his cheeky onscreen persona.
Wearing a sky-blue jumper and a small hoop earring in his left ear, Shep is exhausted after several weeks of relentless sketch-making. Having watched the cast and crew myself at a dress rehearsal in April – frantically dashing between stages, glueing wigs, and assembling sets just seconds before a sketch – I can attest that the hiatus is well deserved.
“I’m really loving it,” Shep smiles, iced latte in hand, as we chat in a busy coffee shop by London Bridge. “It’s obviously mental and really exhausting, but I think we’re all having the best time. It’s so amazing to get to do sketch comedy at all – but on this scale, it’s a ridiculous honour.”
With a format borrowed from its American original – which has become the ultimate comedian-to-Hollywood-star pipeline over the past five decades, launching the careers of Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy and Amy Poehler, among others – SNL UK is arguably the biggest sketch show that Britain has ever seen. Each episode reportedly costs £2m to make, with the cast and crew given just six days to create a live 75-minute show, tailor-made to that week’s celebrity host (so far they’ve had Nicola Coughlan, Jamie Dornan, Aimee Lou Wood, Riz Ahmed, Jack Whitehall and US star Tina Fey).
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Considering all of that – plus the US show’s legacy and the British public’s default cynicism – Shep admits they were all feeling the pressure ahead of that first show. “Obviously, it goes without saying, we were so nervous,” he says. “Nervous about how the show would be received because we wanted people to like it and obviously, people were very sceptical. Our best-case scenario was just that people enjoyed it.
“Our expectations were low about the reaction and the idea that people would engage with an impression or a particular sketch – we had to walk before we could run in that regard.”
As sketch shows go, SNL UK has received a warm reception. Much like a karaoke night out, not every performance is a banger, and some definitely go on too long, but everyone watching is pleased it’s finally happening and having a lot of fun – which was also the general consensus from critics.
Shep’s breakout moment as the shifty-eyed princess was a last-minute addition to the first show – with producers knowing he had it in his impressions arsenal.
“I had mentioned that I could do Princess Diana but in a silly, non-committal way,” Shep says. “In my audition tape, I did her as if she was a guest judge on a reality TV show – because my theory is that if she were alive, God rest her soul, she would 100 per cent be doing the reality TV circuit.
“I’m sorry, but her ass would 1,000 per cent be a guest judge on Drag Race. She would be doing Bake Off, Celebrity Traitors. She’d be hosting a segment of Comic Relief. You know that ON brand that Zendaya works with? She’d be doing something with them.”
Since the show’s premiere in March, Shep has been enjoying the perks of rising stardom. He stopped by Nick Grimshaw’s 6 Music breakfast show with co-star Ania Magliano (“A dream come true, I love Radio 6 more than anything in my life”) and picked up a few celebrity followers (“I got followed by Harry Hill on Instagram the other day – he’s a legend in my house”).
It also meant that he ended up being shared to Donald Trump’s 12.6 million followers on Truth Social, with the US president reposting SNL UK’s first sketch parodying Starmer after it aired. In the skit, Starmer (played as a limb-flailing, muppet-like wimp by the impressive George Fouracres) frets over telling Trump he won’t be sending ships to the Strait of Hormuz and brings in a Gen Z adviser (Shep) to help him.
How did he feel about the sketch having been seen and liked by such a controversial world leader? Shep pauses, having just been picking at a dauntingly large acai bowl. “Obviously, I’m really not a fan of him but I suppose it says a lot about our current administration that my gay ass and Donald damn Trump both think Keir Starmer is a wet fish,” he responds. “Yeah, it was definitely really, really surreal. Like, what the f*** was that about? It still doesn’t really feel like it’s real.”
Strange moments like this are the reason Shep spends his Sundays – the cast and crew’s one day off – away from his phone. “We were talking about it at work and it’s a thing where, to quote [singer and social media star] Addison Rae, ‘Fame Is A Gun’,” he says in his trademark ironic way, with pursed lips and raised eyebrows. “Your phone really feels like a loaded gun because you want to hold it and make sure it’s not going to go off, but also, it might go off?
“So on Sundays, I typically get coffee with friends, then get a pint with friends and then have a Chinese with friends. I put my phone in a bin and I drink beer, then coffee, and I yo-yo between.
“My fear of putting the phone in the bin is if there’s a family emergency or like, if a famous, incredibly powerful politician reshares something you’re in, for example – and you’re not on your phone to process that and deal with that in the moment,” he says, totally deadpan.
While Shep can’t wait to get off the internet these days, he has it to thank for his comedy career taking off. Born and raised in Bedfordshire, Shep always knew he wanted to do something creative in life, having been “quite annoying” and a “funny dweeb” at school.
After being “deeply closeted for a hilariously long time”, Shep came out in his late teens, went to King’s College London for a film studies degree and started doing “this horrible little thing called improv comedy for a laugh”. During the pandemic, the comic was convinced to start uploading TikToks by a friend, and his videos took off; he’s since racked up 7.5 million likes and nearly 89,000 followers.
“That was basically how I ‘made a name for myself’, in air quotes, because people knew who I was from the odd video,” he explains. “For a lot of people, that’s their way in now – which is slightly depressing but maybe also really good and democratic?” Shep says, his voice going up. “You decide. #YouDecide. #ReadersOfTheIndyYouDecide.”
A stand-up comedian by night, Shep had a very different job during the day – a football coach for kids under five. “That was my job, and then I would do the odd acting job, the odd comedy gig, the odd writing job. For the past two years, 60 per cent of my income and life was football coaching, and the other 40 per cent was comedy stuff.
“These were massively dinky kids. It was more like, ‘Don’t eat the ball’ and ‘it’s football, not handball’, that kind of thing. I really loved it and I miss it, but five years is a long time to be coaching football.”
One hundred per cent of Shep’s income may be coming from comedy now, thanks to SNL UK, but he’s not resting on his laurels. He’s yet to have job offers roll in off the back of the sketch show – although he’ll be appearing in Channel 4 sitcom Break Clause with Lara Ricote and Samuel Bottomley later this year. “I really just want to work,” he says sincerely. “We’ll see what happens with this show and after. It’s a wet answer, I know, but I think it’s true that it never stops being difficult in comedy.
“You can have an amazing five years and then never work again. That’s just how the industry goes.”
But with SNL UK officially returning for a second series and the comedy industry seemingly booming with shows like Last One Laughing UK becoming word-of-mouth hits, there’s a lot to feel optimistic about. “It never fails to amaze me how much people love comedy,” he grins. “People really have such an appetite for it, especially stuff that’s quite light. People love to laugh. It’s nice to see that people are realising that again, and to see more comedy that feels quite surreal and fringe and more minority voices being championed.”
On the other side of the spectrum, “anti-woke” comics are also on the rise, decrying cancellation by the left while also riding high on Netflix’s streaming charts. In April, Stewart Lee suggested that “there’s a positive financial value” to comedians being politically incorrect, adding: “If they create offence, it creates interest.”
For Shep, nothing is “off limits” – but it has to be funny. “I think that women and people of colour and queer people are really patronised by a lot of edge lords and vitriolic male comedians, but actually marginalised people have a massive capacity for satire and dark humour,” he says. “There just has to be a joke. No one’s saying you can’t make jokes about gay people. There just has to actually be a joke, and there never is. If there is, I’ll laugh! We have a conversation on our show a lot in regards to what to make sketches about, like topical things, and there just has to be a joke.
“That’s how I feel about that kind of you-can’t-say-anything-these-days comics. You can, but what you’re saying isn’t comedy. People are so defensive of their ability to just say random s***. Say it, girl! No one cares, but in the same way that you’re allowed to say that, people should be allowed to hold discourse and criticism about the things they say.”
SNL UK will be back next week, with Ncuti Gatwa hosting the final episode in the series, and we’ll have to stay tuned to see whether Shep resurrects Diana. “We’ll have to have a reason,” he says coyly. “I’ll see if one comes up.” But after his star turn on the Sky series, there’s no doubt that Shep’s comedy reign is only just beginning.
The ‘Saturday Night Live UK’ finale will take place on Saturday 16 May at 10pm on Sky and Now TV
