Jim Rash

Biography:

Jim Rash was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. He and his sister were both adopted, and he attended Charlotte Latin School before completing a post-graduate year at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. After relocating to Los Angeles, he became a member of the well-known improv troupe The Groundlings.

Rash’s early onscreen roles included Mr. Grayson/Stitches in Sky High (2005), Fenton on That ’70s Show and That ’90s Show, and Andrew—the “whorehouse guy”—on Reno 911! He also appeared in the final episode of Friends and played Head T.A. Philip in Slackers. From 2009 to 2015, Rash gained widespread recognition for his role as Craig Pelton, the eccentric dean on the sitcom Community.

Rash and his writing partner Nat Faxon transitioned into screenwriting with their 2005 pilot Adopted, though it was not picked up. Their breakthrough came with The Descendants (2011), adapted from the novel of the same name. The script had been featured on the 2008 Black List, and the film went on to receive major critical acclaim, earning a Golden Globe nomination and winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In 2013, Rash and Faxon co-wrote and co-directed The Way Way Back, a coming-of-age film partially inspired by Rash’s own teenage years. Premiering to a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival, the movie—featuring Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Maya Rudolph, and Sam Rockwell—became both a critical and commercial success and was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Comedy.

The duo reunited again for Downhill (2020), an American remake of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014). Starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the film premiered at Sundance to mixed reviews, with many critics comparing it to the original.

Rash has also had a prolific voice-acting career. He portrayed the Marquess of Queensberry across all four seasons of Mike Tyson Mysteries, voiced Gyro Gearloose in the DuckTales reboot (2017–2021), and in 2023 voiced the Fixer—a recurring enforcer character—in My Dad the Bounty Hunter, where he also performed as a video-game announcer.

In a 2022 interview promoting the film Bros, Rash shared that he came out more than a decade earlier.