Adam DeVine

Adam Patrick DeVine is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer best known as a co-creator and star of the Comedy Central series Workaholics, as the cocky a cappella antagonist Bumper Allen in the Pitch Perfect films, as Andy the manny in Modern Family, and as the perpetually overcompensating youth pastor Kelvin Gemstone in HBO's The Righteous Gemstones. Across more than fifteen years on screen, he has built a career on a particular brand of high-energy, slightly oblivious bravado, frequently playing characters whose confidence wildly outstrips their competence.

DeVine was born on November 7, 1983, in Waterloo, Iowa, the son of Dennis and Penny DeVine. The family later moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he grew up and graduated from Millard South High School in 2002. The defining event of his childhood came in 1995, when he was eleven years old. While riding his bicycle, DeVine was struck by a cement truck, an accident so severe that doctors initially feared he would lose his legs and warned the family about the risk of multiple organ failure. He has spoken in interviews about the long recovery that followed, including more than two dozen surgeries and an extended period in a wheelchair. By a strange piece of luck, the bicycle frame absorbed much of the impact, which DeVine has credited with saving his life. He eventually regained full mobility, though he has said he still carries extensive scarring on his legs.

Returning to school after the accident, DeVine has recalled being teased about his injuries and his altered gait, and he leaned on humor as a coping strategy, learning that making classmates laugh could redirect attention and defuse cruelty. He has cited that experience as the origin of his belief that comedy is fundamentally a tool for connection. After high school he enrolled at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, where he met Blake Anderson, who would become one of his closest collaborators. He also studied acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco before settling in Los Angeles to pursue stand-up and on-camera work.

In Los Angeles, DeVine reconnected with Anderson and joined forces with Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck. The four formed a sketch troupe called Mail Order Comedy and began posting videos online in the mid-2000s. Their internet shorts caught the eye of Comedy Central, which in 2011 ordered Workaholics, a single-camera sitcom about three telemarketers and their drug-dealer friend sharing a house in suburban California. DeVine, Anderson, and Holm starred and served as creators and writers, with Newacheck directing. The series, in which DeVine played the swaggering, perpetually shirtless Adam DeMamp, ran for seven seasons through 2017 and developed a devoted fan base, becoming a defining stoner-comedy property of its era.

While Workaholics was still on the air, DeVine broke through to a much broader audience with Pitch Perfect in 2012. As Bumper Allen, the smug lead of a rival a cappella group at a fictional university, he provided much of the film's antagonism and a surprising amount of its sweetness, eventually pairing off with Rebel Wilson's Fat Amy. He reprised the role in Pitch Perfect 2 in 2015 and later anchored the spin-off series Bumper in Berlin on Peacock, which premiered in 2022 and gave him a chance to play the character in middle age, chasing pop-music fame in Germany.

Television sitcom audiences came to know him through Modern Family, where he had a recurring role as Andy Bailey, the earnest manny hired by Jay and Gloria Pritchett. The character, who appeared across multiple seasons beginning in 2013, became a fan favorite and gave DeVine room to play softer, more romantic notes than his loud-comedy persona usually allowed. Around the same time he led the ABC ensemble The Real O'Neals and voiced characters in animated projects including Green Eggs and Ham and the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs franchise.

His most acclaimed dramatic-comedy work has come on The Righteous Gemstones, Danny McBride's HBO satire of a wealthy televangelist family. From the show's 2019 premiere through its conclusion in 2025, DeVine played Kelvin Gemstone, the youngest of the Gemstone children, a vain, theologically shallow youth-ministry leader given to rhinestones, gym selfies, and a complicated platonic-romantic friendship with his bodyguard Keefe. The role earned him some of the strongest reviews of his career and demonstrated a willingness to commit to absurdity without winking at the camera.

On the film side, DeVine has appeared in studio comedies including Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates opposite Zac Efron, When We First Met, Game Over, Man!, Magic Camp, and Jexi. In 2022 he co-starred with Diane Keaton in Mack and Rita, a body-swap comedy in which a young writer wakes up in the form of her seventy-year-old self. He has continued to tour as a stand-up and released the Netflix special Best Time of Our Lives in 2019.

DeVine met actress Chloe Bridges, known for The Carrie Diaries and Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam, on a flight to the set of the horror comedy The Final Girls in 2014. The pair began dating the following year, became engaged in October 2019, and married in October 2021. Their first child, a son named Beau, was born on February 16, 2024. DeVine has spoken publicly about how fatherhood reshaped his priorities and his comedy, joking that domestic life has given him fresh material while also softening his appetite for the rowdier shoots of his twenties.

Now in his early forties, DeVine occupies a settled spot in American comedy: a reliable on-screen presence, a working stand-up, and a writer-producer with a track record of building shows around his own voice. His path from a near-fatal childhood accident in Nebraska to long runs on Comedy Central and HBO is unusual, and he has often returned, in interviews and in his stand-up, to the idea that the willingness to be laughed at was the first thing that ever made him feel safe.