Anders Holm

Anders Holm is an American actor, writer, comedian and producer best known as one of the four creators and stars of the Comedy Central series Workaholics, where he played the swaggering, self-styled alpha Anders "Ders" Holmvik for seven seasons. Born on 29 May 1981 in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Holm grew up in a sports-minded family before channelling that competitive streak into comedy, performance and a long collaborative partnership with the writers and performers who would eventually become his on-screen housemates.

Holm attended Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School and later the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a member of the swim team and earned a degree in communication arts. After graduating he moved to Los Angeles to pursue comedy, taking classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where he met Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine and Kyle Newacheck. The four formed the sketch troupe Mail Order Comedy in 2006 and began posting absurd, low-budget videos online, building a small but devoted following with a loose, riff-heavy sensibility that mixed stoner humour with a sharp, almost sitcom-precise sense of structure.

That web work caught the attention of Comedy Central, which ordered Workaholics to series in 2010. The show, set in a fictional telemarketing firm called TelAmeriCorp and the suburban tract house its three leads shared, premiered in April 2011 and became one of the network's signature comedies. Holm co-created the series with Anderson, DeVine and Newacheck, served as a writer and executive producer, and starred as Ders, the would-be ladies' man whose corporate ambitions were perpetually undermined by his roommates' weed-fuelled schemes. Workaholics ran for seven seasons and 86 episodes, ending in 2017, and remains a touchstone of late-2000s and early-2010s American slacker comedy. Holm also co-created and co-starred with the same trio in the 2018 Netflix horror-comedy feature Game Over, Man!, in which the friends played hotel employees forced to fight off a hostage-taking gang.

While Workaholics was still on the air, Holm built a parallel career as a supporting player in studio comedies and prestige cable. He appeared as the rival writer Casey Peerson in Chris Rock's 2014 film Top Five and turned up in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's The Interview the same year, playing a producer caught up in the film's fictionalised plot to interview the leader of North Korea. In 2014 he also began a recurring, then regular, role on Mindy Kaling's Fox and Hulu series The Mindy Project as Jason Riff, a smug, attention-seeking writer at a competing publication, a part that leaned hard on his ability to play handsome, oblivious self-regard for laughs. The same year saw him cast opposite Nat Faxon and Judy Greer in the FX comedy Married, where over two seasons he played Bernie, the husband of Greer's character and a friend of Faxon's wandering protagonist. The series, created by Andrew Gurland, gave Holm his first sustained chance to play a more grounded, lived-in adult, balancing the broader comic instincts honed on Workaholics.

In 2015 Holm starred opposite Cobie Smulders in Kris Swanberg's indie drama Unexpected, playing John, a teacher whose girlfriend, also a teacher at an inner-city Chicago school, becomes pregnant at the same time as one of her students. Quietly observed and largely improvised, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and showcased a softer, more vulnerable register than audiences accustomed to Ders had seen, and it remains one of the performances Holm is most often singled out for by critics. He returned to broader studio comedy the following year with How to Be Single, the New Line Cinema ensemble piece adapted from Liz Tuccillo's novel, in which he played Tom, a bartender who becomes entangled with Dakota Johnson's recently-single protagonist. He had earlier shown up briefly but memorably as the dismissive ex Adam in Paul Feig's The Heat in 2013, alongside small parts in Neighbors and other studio comedies of the period.

Holm wrote and starred in the 2018 USA Network sitcom pilot Champaign ILL, later picked up by YouTube Premium, in which he and Adam Pally played childhood friends and members of an entourage forced to return to their downstate Illinois hometown after the sudden death of the rapper whose career they had been riding. The show, on which Holm served as a writer and executive producer, ran for one ten-episode season in 2018 and gave him another chance to combine performance, writing and showrunning, drawing implicitly on his own Illinois upbringing. He has continued to write and produce for half-hour comedy throughout his career, including development work in the Workaholics orbit.

In addition to series leads, Holm has been a steady presence as a guest and recurring player on television, with appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Inside Amy Schumer, New Girl, Arrested Development and Goosebumps, and voice work on adult-animation series. He has lent his voice to American Dad!, Robot Chicken and the Netflix animated series Disenchantment, among others, and has hosted and presented at various comedy and sports-adjacent events, including coverage tied to his enduring identity as a Chicago sports fan.

Off-screen, Holm has been married to producer Emma Nesper since 2011; the couple have three children and live in Los Angeles. He is known among collaborators for an unusually disciplined approach to comedy writing, a legacy of the years he and the Workaholics team spent grinding out web sketches before being given a network platform, and he has frequently credited the UCB scene and his Mail Order Comedy partners with shaping the voice that runs through everything from Ders to Champaign ILL. Whether smirking through a Top Five table read, fumbling parenthood in Unexpected or barking corporate platitudes in a beige TelAmeriCorp cubicle, Holm has built a career on the same core trick: making cheerful, self-impressed men funny by taking their delusions entirely seriously.