Tim Meadows

Tim Meadows is an American actor and comedian born on February 5, 1961, in Highland Park, Michigan, a Detroit enclave. His parents were Mardell, a nurse's assistant, and Lathon Meadows, a janitor. Meadows attended Wayne State University before leaving to pursue a career in comedy; the university conferred an honorary doctorate upon him in 2022.

Meadows launched his performing career doing improvisational comedy at the Soup Kitchen Saloon in Detroit before relocating to Chicago, where he joined The Second City comedy troupe alongside Chris Farley. In the fall of 1990, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels observed Meadows performing at Second City and brought him to New York for a meeting rather than a formal audition. During that visit, Meadows read a line for a sketch involving Steve Martin, Paul Simon, and Ralph Nader — material written for the first Five-Timers Club sketch in the Tom Hanks episode that aired December 8, 1990 — though Meadows himself did not appear in the episode. He officially joined the SNL cast two months later, in February 1991, and remained with the program for ten seasons until 2000. That tenure stood as the record for longest continuous service on the show until Darrell Hammond surpassed it in 2005, a record subsequently broken by Kenan Thompson in 2017. His extended run became a recurring joke in monologues when former cast members Phil Hartman, Mike Myers, and Farley returned to host, and when Alec Baldwin hosted for the twelfth time.

During his decade on SNL, Meadows performed impressions of public figures including Oprah Winfrey, Erykah Badu, Michael Jackson, and Tiger Woods, and executed a quick-change impersonation of both O.J. Simpson and Al Cowlings within a single sketch. He also appeared in segments as a fictionalized version of himself, including a Weekend Update appearance in which he expressed frustration over the 1994 NHL lockout. One of his most enduring SNL creations was Leon Phelps, known as "The Ladies' Man," a talk-show host character that was subsequently adapted into the 2000 film The Ladies' Man. For his work on SNL, Meadows received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 1993.

Following his SNL tenure, Meadows built a substantial film and television career. He appeared in several SNL-derived films, including Coneheads, It's Pat, and Wayne's World 2. In 2004, he played Principal Duvall in Mean Girls, written by fellow SNL alumna Tina Fey, and later reprised the role in Mean Girls 2. He co-starred in The Benchwarmers in 2006 alongside former SNL colleagues Rob Schneider and David Spade, and appeared in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story in 2007. Additional credits include The Even Stevens Movie, in which he played Miles McDermott in 2003, and a guest appearance on the NBC comedy The Office in the second-season episode "The Client." He held a recurring role as P.K. Winsome on The Colbert Report and appeared in Brooklyn Nine-Nine as Jake Peralta's cannibal prison cellmate. He starred in The Bill Engvall Show and appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and was featured in season two of Space Force.

On television, Meadows joined the cast of the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs in 2013 in a recurring role as Mr. Glascott, a guidance counselor at the show's high school. When the spinoff series Schooled launched on ABC, Meadows was elevated to the lead role of John Glascott, a position he held for the show's two-season run. In 2014, he co-starred in the NBC sitcom Marry Me alongside Casey Wilson and Ken Marino, playing one of a pair of gay fathers both named Kevin. In 2016, he starred in the Fox live-action and animation hybrid Son of Zorn opposite Cheryl Hines and Jason Sudeikis.

In 2024, Meadows reprised his role as Principal Ron Duvall in the film adaptation of the Mean Girls Broadway musical, and that same year made his Broadway debut in All In: Comedy About Love. Meadows has continued to perform improv in Chicago and Los Angeles at venues including the ImprovOlympic and Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and has performed regularly in the improvised sketch show Heather, Miles, and Tim with Heather Anne Campbell and Miles Stroth. Meadows married Michelle Taylor in 1997; the couple had two sons together before divorcing in 2005.