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Will Sharpe is a kind Renaissance man

- ELEANOR STANFORD

When Will Sharpe arrived at Cambridge University in the mid-aughts, he was one of many undergraduates wanting to join Footlights, the storied sketch comedy troupe that had launched the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson.

His friends thought it best to spend a few months figuring out what kind of comedy Footlights might favour before applying, but Sharpe wanted to jump right in.

At a first-semester showcase open to nonmembers, Sharpe and his friends performed a wacky sketch that involved pretending to eat a tub of Vaseline by the handful. He was made a member and was later elected president of the troupe.

Sharpe's biweekly Footlights performances — which also included playing a white crayon that was sad it was never taken out of the box — "definitely encouraged a risk-taking attitude, because you could fail and try again, and fail and try again", Sharpe recalled in an interview at a woodland cafe near his North London home.

In the two decades since college, Sharpe, now 38, has tried — and often succeeded at — a variety of creative projects, including writing, directing, acting, playing music and performing comedy. Claire Foy, whom Sharpe directed in the 2021 biopic The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain, described him in an interview with The New York Times as "a Renaissance man"- "a kind one".

American audiences, though, know Sharpe best from his chameleonic run of recent acting gigs: the stoic tech hunk in Season 2 of HBO's The White Lotus; the earnest tour guide in Jesse Eisenberg's Oscar-winning movie A Real Pain; and now, as Felix, the enigmatic indie musician in the romcom Too Much, Lena Dunham's new Netflix series arriving tomorrow.