Jason Kravits

Jason Kravits is an American character actor born on May 28, 1967, in Passaic, New Jersey. His family relocated to Rockville, Maryland in 1975, where he attended Colonel Zadok A. Magruder High School. He later enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1986 co-founded the university's first improv comedy group, Erasable Inc. Kravits is Jewish.

His professional acting career began while he was still in middle school, when he was cast as Lolo Knopke on the PBS series Powerhouse, which aired in 1982. Following his graduation from the University of Maryland, Kravits built his early theater career in the Washington, D.C. area, performing at venues including the Washington Jewish Theater, Shakespeare Theater, Round House Theater, and Woolly Mammoth Theater. His work in the region earned him two Helen Hayes Award nominations, for performances in Nicky Silver's Free Will and Wonton Lust and David Ives's All in the Timing. During this period he also appeared in the film Major League II and the television series Homicide: Life on the Street.

In 1995, Kravits moved to New York City, where he performed with the writer and performer collective A Rumble in the Redroom. He and fellow performer Joel Hurt Jones developed the two-man musical sketch show An Evening with Kravits and Jones. After the duo brought the show to the Improv Comedy Club in Los Angeles in 1998, they were invited to perform at the 1999 HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado, where they received the Jury Award for Best Sketch Show.

Kravits relocated to Los Angeles in 1999 and began working regularly in television and film. That year he guest starred on ABC's The Practice as A.D.A. Richard Bay, a role for which he is perhaps best known. He became a recurring character in the show's fourth season and a series regular in its fifth. On the series' 100th episode in 2001, the character of Bay was assassinated after refusing to throw a murder trial. Kravits went on to appear in Gilmore Girls, Everybody Loves Raymond, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the final episode of Friends. He also appeared as a panelist on NBC's Hollywood Squares and CBS's To Tell the Truth.

Kravits returned to New York in 2003 and made his Broadway debut that same year in Larry Gelbart's comedy play Sly Fox. In 2006, he originated the role of Gangster Number 1 in the Tony Award-winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone, directed by Casey Nicholaw, performing alongside his brother Garth Kravits, who played Gangster Number 2. In 2011, Kravits joined the cast of Relatively Speaking, a production of three one-act plays by Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, directed by John Turturro.

In 2015, Kravits developed a solo improvised cabaret show called Off the Top, built entirely from audience suggestions. The show has been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and venues in London, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Birdland Theatre in New York. Off the Top received a Bistro Award for Best Comedy in 2017 and was nominated for a MAC Award in 2021.

Kravits continued to accumulate television credits, with guest appearances on Chuck Lorre productions including The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon, and B Positive. He provided voices for the animated series Our Cartoon President, including those of Michael Bloomberg and Alan Dershowitz. He has also produced viral parody videos, among them a Hamilton-inspired song about William Henry Harrison titled Harrison, an animated parody of Dr. Seuss's The Grinch called The Kvetch, and a 2024 animated short titled The Project 2025, inspired by Schoolhouse Rock and detailing the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 initiative. In 2025, Kravits was cast as Vice Principal Douglas Paunch in the off-Broadway revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at New World Stages.