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Actor

1961-02-05 · Highland Park, Michigan, USA · Male

47 series in the catalog

Tim Meadows (born February 5, 1961) is an American actor and comedian. He was one of the longest-running cast members on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, where he appeared for 10 seasons from 1991 to 2000. For his work on SNL, he received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 1993. He played main character John Glascott on the ABC sitcom Schooled for its two-season run after playing the same character in a recurring role for six seasons on The Goldbergs. Meadows is also known for his role as Principal Duvall in the 2004 teen comedy film Mean Girls, a role he then reprised in Mean Girls 2 and in the film's 2024 musical adaptation.

Early life

Meadows was born in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park, Michigan, the son of Mardell, a nurse's assistant, and Lathon Meadows, a janitor. He attended Wayne State University before leaving to begin his comedy career; the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2022.

Career

Meadows began performing improvisational comedy at the Soup Kitchen Saloon in Detroit. Meadows's start in show business was in Chicago as a member of The Second City comedy troupe, alongside Chris Farley. In Fall 1990, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels saw Meadows perform at Second City, and brought him into a meeting in New York, without auditioning for the show, where he read a line for a sketch with Steve Martin, Paul Simon, and Ralph Nader, which was for the first Five-Timers Club sketch for the Tom Hanks episode on December 8, 1990, in which Meadows did not appear at all.

Meadows would instead officially land a spot on SNL two months later in February 1991, and went on to become a longtime cast member, appearing on the program until 2000. (Meadows was on the show for 10 seasons; this was the record for the longest tenure on the show until it was surpassed by Darrell Hammond in 2005, whose record was also surpassed by Kenan Thompson in 2017.) Meadows's lengthy tenure on the show was used as a gag in four monologues when former cast members Phil Hartman, Mike Myers and Farley returned to the show to host, and when Alec Baldwin hosted for his 12th time.

During his time on SNL, Meadows often spoofed famous personalities, including Oprah Winfrey, Erykah Badu, Michael Jackson, and Tiger Woods, and one time was a quick-change artist to pull off an impersonation of both O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings within the timespan of one SNL skit. Some skits had Meadows playing a fictionalized version of himself, such as being a fan of ice hockey on Weekend Update, stating his dissatisfaction with the 1994 NHL lockout and remarking, "What am I supposed to do about this; watch basketball?" Another sketch as himself was introducing the entire SNL cast as their most famous characters, such as Wayne and Garth or Melanie Hutsell as Jan Brady, in a sing-along denouncing the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which ends with Meadows remarking, "This is personal to me...mainly because I don't have an SNL character to play!" Eventually, he did get an original character with Leon Phelps, "The Ladies' Man", a perpetually horny talk-show host who falsely believed himself to be the living definition of what women search for in a man. The character was adapted into a 2000 film, The Ladies' Man, which followed the character's attempts to find love and a suitable outlet for his beloved radio program. In 2001, he co-starred in Three Days; in 2003, he appeared as Miles McDermott in The Even Stevens Movie.

Meadows soon moved on to other projects, including a regular role on the short-lived NBC sitcom The Michael Richards Show and a supporting role in the 2004 film The Cookout. He also guest-starred as a client on the hit NBC comedy The Office in the second-season episode "The Client". He played a high-school principal in Mean Girls, a film written by (and co-starring) fellow SNL cast member Tina Fey. He also had a part in Handsome Boy Modeling School's album White People. In 2007, he appeared in a substantial supporting role in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

Meadows has appeared in other feature films, including Coneheads, It's Pat, and Wayne's World 2, all of which were based on popular SNL characters and had varying degrees of success. He co-starred in the 2006 film The Benchwarmers alongside his former SNL co-stars Rob Schneider and David Spade. He was also featured in CBS's Gameshow Marathon (summer 2006), has appeared on The Colbert Report in the recurring role of P.K. Winsome, a conservative pundit and entrepreneur (who made an appearance at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear), and starred in The Bill Engvall Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was also a frequent guest on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson as a comic field reporter. On May 31, 2008, Meadows threw out a ceremonial first pitch and conducted the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field during a Chicago Cubs game against the Colorado Rockies.

In 2014, Meadows co-starred alongside Casey Wilson and Ken Marino in the short-lived NBC sitcom Marry Me. Dan Bucatinsky and he played "the Kevins", the gay dads of Annie (played by Wilson), who are both named Kevin. Since 2013, he has appeared in a recurring role on the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, playing Mr. Glascott, the high school's parrot-owning guidance counselor. In 2016, he began starring in the FOX live-action/animation hybrid Son of Zorn opposite Cheryl Hines and Jason Sudeikis. He also had a recurring role in Brooklyn Nine-Nine as Jake Peralta's cannibal prison cellmate.

Meadows is featured in season two of Space Force starring Steve Carell.

Meadows continues to perform improv in Chicago and Los Angeles, most frequently at venues such as the ImprovOlympic and Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. With Heather Anne Campbell and Miles Stroth, Meadows frequently performed in the improvised sketch show, Heather, Miles, and Tim in Los Angeles.

On February 17, 2023, Meadows was announced to reprise his role as Principal Ron Duvall from the first Mean Girls film in the stage-to-screen adaptation of the Broadway musical.

Personal life

Meadows married Michelle Taylor in 1997. They have two sons together. They divorced in 2005.