Rob Delaney

The man who survived his own disaster

Rob Delaney crashed into a power company building in Los Angeles one night in 2002. He was driving drunk, broke both arms, shattered his knees and ended up in a hospital cell before going to jail. That crash wasn't the start of his acting career, but it was the point of no return for his sobriety, a state he has maintained ever since and that defines his blunt writing.

Before stepping onto a television set, this American, born in 1977, used Twitter as a testing lab. In 2009 he began posting short, strange jokes on the social network when almost nobody knew what the platform was for. His writing stood out for a mix of brutal honesty about depression and physical humor that bordered on the absurd.

And the gamble paid off.

His success online allowed him to move to London to create one of the most brutally honest comedies of the last decade with Sharon Horgan. In 2015, they premiered Catastrophe, a series that avoided romcom clichés to focus on the messiness of cohabitation and unplanned parenthood. Delaney played an advertising executive who has to deal with an accidental pregnancy and a life he had not planned at all.

The series stayed on the air until 2019 and earned Emmy nominations for its writing. But while his career was taking off in Europe, his personal life was hitting an impenetrable wall.

The weight of reality and blockbusters

In 2018 his son Henry died at the age of two from a brain tumor. Delaney did not hide the process or try to turn his grief into a motivational life lesson for his fans. On the contrary, he spoke about death with surgical coldness and a necessary anger that distanced him from the image of a harmless comedian.

Pain became literature you can't escape.

In 2022, he published A Heart That Works, a memoir in which he recounts his son's illness without frills or comforting metaphors. Literary critics praised his ability to keep the narrative moving without slipping into the cheap sentimentality of self-help biographies. The book became a reference for understanding loss from a purely human and practical standpoint.

But mainstream movies also came knocking thanks to his everyday-guy look and imposing height. In 2018 he played Peter in Deadpool 2, a character with no superpowers who simply auditioned after seeing the ad in the newspaper. That role gave him global visibility that he never sought with his stand-up comedy.

Nobody expected a Twitter personality to end up in a Marvel franchise.

The Coldness of Data and the Future

During 2023, he took part in the sixth season of the anthology series Black Mirror, specifically in the episode titled Joan is Awful. There he shared the cast with Salma Hayek and Annie Murphy in a satire about streaming platforms and the use of artificial intelligence to replicate actors' likenesses. That same year, he appeared in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, playing a senior U.S. intelligence official.

His presence in major productions hasn't stopped him from speaking out on politics. Delaney is an active supporter of Britain's National Health Service and has taken part in fundraising campaigns for trade unions in the UK. He understands that his privileged position in the industry is a statistical anomaly after his years of addiction.

In 2024 Delaney returned to his role as Peter for the movie Deadpool & Wolverine, directed by Shawn Levy. The production had an estimated budget of $200 million and was filmed mainly at Pinewood Studios in London. Delaney's production schedule for the coming months includes shooting an action comedy on location in Atlanta.