If Taskmaster and Celebrity Traitors have not yet familiarised you with Nick Mohammed, let me jog your memory. We’re part-way through the BAFTAs 2024, and a man in an ombré sequinned suit roller skates onto the stage. His three minutes of character comedy go down like marmite. The camera zooms in on a bemused Emma Stone; the audience’s intermittent laughter accompanies Mohammed’s high-pitched Yorkshire accent. Later, The Independent reports that viewers cringed at the skit, while The Daily Mail characterises spectators as “furious”. Responses were divided, however, with one Youtube commenter hailing the performance “the only part of the BAFTAs worth watching”.
During our conversation, Mohammed brings up this “monstrously terrifying” experience of his own accord. He remembers receiving the phone call that offered him the gig: “I was aware that it probably wasn’t going to go down that well – it’s too weird! I’m not famous enough for that audience to go, ‘Oh, this is Nick Mohammed doing Mr Swallow’”. But, at the same time, “there was no way [he] was going to turn them down!”. Mr Swallow, Mohammed’s camp and energetic character, was born in the Cambridge Footlights. Based on an English teacher from Mohammed’s secondary school, he made his debut at the Corpus Playroom.
“The Footlights made me realise that it might be possible to have a career in the arts […] – it was a privileged position to be in, frankly”
“It was a Smoker where I first performed as Swallow,” Mohammed reminisces. The Ted Lasso actor started pursuing comedy seriously while studying for a PhD in Seismology at Magdalene College. His debut as Swallow felt authentic, he remembers: “I definitely knew that I enjoyed performing with that kind of attitude, but I would never have anticipated that I’d still be doing it now!”.
It became clear that Swallow was the character that “got the most reaction from an audience” during his time with the Footlights and when performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. “The Footlights made me realise that it might be possible to have a career in the arts, partly because I was surrounded by other likeminded people, partly because of the longstanding history of others having succeeded before you – it was a privileged position to be in, frankly”. Beforehand, the comedian was geared towards a career in academia or geophysics, but Cambridge’s theatre culture “ignited a fire” in Mohammed, who had previously worked as a magician throughout his time at Durham University.
‘Mr Swallow, Show Pony’, Mohammed’s current tour, riffs off of the beloved Swallow, and reviewers have complimented its more vulnerable, even autobiographical angle. “I’m getting older and becoming more reflective,” he notes, “but I’ve always thought there was something interesting in talking about the origin of the character”. The tour, coming to the Corn Exchange this October, enters “new territory,” he says: “I can talk about my – Nick Mohammed’s – experiences as a comedian, but as Mr Swallow”. For this self-referential comedy to function, he describes that “you don’t want the mask to slip too soon, but there’s something fun about dropping the fourth wall, then building it back up, then dropping it again”.
Mohammed is a jack of many trades. The writer, actor, and stand-up comic is best known for playing Nate in the Apple TV comedy series Ted Lasso, but he doesn’t hesitate when I ask which type of comedy he prefers. “Live is where my heart is – it was my first love. There’s something about the immediacy between you as a performer and the audience”. That said, he reiterates that he’s “fortunate to be able to bounce between” televised and live comedy, and recalls playing Nate with fondness. To start with, he “felt really comfortable in knowing what to do to make that character funny”. During the first season, his directors allowed him to “just have fun playing the character,” sometimes encouraging a “slapstick” approach. Candidly, Mohammed remarks that in later seasons, “the emotional side was the stuff that I struggled with - it wasn’t in my wheelhouse”. His character’s dramatic arc “sort of took the comedy out of it,” but despite the difficulty of the role, he “relished in the challenge”.
“Live is where my heart is – it was my first love”
More recently, Mohammed starred as a social outcast in the action comedy Deep Cover alongside Bryce Dallas Howard and Orlando Bloom. “To do a leading role in a film – I’d never experienced anything like it! You’ve got all these toys and the stunts and these cameras”. Speaking to Mohammed feels more like chatting to a theatrically-inclined friend than an award-winning actor. He exudes liveliness like a kid in a sweet shop; it’s as if he’s somehow still shocked at his career path.
Mohammed’s character in Deep Cover struggles to understand workplace banter, and he plays him so well that it’s almost painful. His opening scenes make your toes curl with second-hand embarrassment. The Prime TV special tells the story of three amateur improv comedians going undercover. Pretending to be bad at improv comedy was a struggle, Mohammed confesses – “it’s like, how do you do that when you know the rules of improvisation already?”. Nevertheless, “you still have to understand where the comedy beats lie, even when playing someone who’s not funny,” he tells me. Some of his stand-up flops have informed this technique: “I know what it feels like to do something enthusiastically on stage and it not quite hit the mark that you want it to”.
But resilience is a key feature of this line of work, Mohammed reiterates. “You’re never going to be the best thing right at the start. It’s easy to think that you’re not good enough if you didn’t get an audition, didn’t get the reviews you wanted, didn’t get the audience you wanted”. He’s asked for advice often, he tells me, and stresses that it’s not plain-sailing, even for him: “the last four castings I did, I haven’t got! I have to believe that I will get one at some point; you’ve got to remain positive and remember that it’s difficult, notoriously difficult, this industry.”
Alongside stand-up comedy and TV acting, Mohammed has also tried his hand at script writing. Intelligence, the Sky Series created by Mohammed in which he stars alongside David Schwimmer, was more laborious to write than a Mr Swallow show, the comic tells me. “With TV writing, I really struggle with seeing the overall structures of the plot, whereas with live stuff, there’s nobody in charge of me doing it – if I want to stop I can just stop! TV writing feels a little bit more like homework sometimes,” he chuckles. Backpedaling slightly, he praises the process as “fulfilling” and “rewarding”, but ultimately he feels that this “linear” writing style isn’t where his talents lie. His creative process with live material is more jumbled: “you can play with the parts a bit – you end up piecing them together like a puzzle”.
“I know what it feels like to do something enthusiastically on stage and it not quite hit the mark”
Mohammed’s calm and collected wisdom compliments his more erratic passion. I ask him about the Edinburgh Fringe after our allotted interview time is up, and he waxes lyrical about the festival for another five minutes. “I adooore it,” he says; “I try to go up with the family every year”. He mentions his wife Becca and his three children frequently. We’d rescheduled our conversation so that he could collect his eldest after a school trip, and during, he answers the phone to confirm pick-up arrangements with Becca. He’s apologetic yet uncompromising, a buoyantly polite character that is simultaneously self-assured.
You get the sense that Mohammed throws himself into every venture wholeheartedly, almost regardless of its reception. Even when recounting those eventful BAFTAs that caused him to momentarily question whether he’d “completely scuppered” his career, he’s firm – “I’d do it again in a heartbeat”.
