Adam McKay (born April 17, 1968) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and comedian. McKay began his career as a head writer for the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2001. Following his departure from SNL, he rose to fame in the 2000s for his collaborations with comedian Will Ferrell and co-wrote his comedy films Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. Ferrell and McKay later co-wrote and co-produced numerous television series and films, with McKay himself co-producing their website Funny or Die through their company Gary Sanchez Productions. McKay began venturing into more dramatic territory in the 2010s. The Big Short was his first film he directed without Ferrell in the cast. For this film, McKay was nominated for several awards including two Academy Awards, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (with co-writer Charles Randolph), and two British Academy Film Awards, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. McKay and Randolph won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, the BAFTA Film Awards, and the WGA Awards. For his work on the Dick Cheney biographical film Vice, McKay received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. In 2019, McKay founded Hyperobject Industries. In 2022, he received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for his latest work on the apocalyptic comedy film Don't Look Up. Early life McKay was born in Denver and was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts and later Malvern, Pennsylvania by a mother who was a waitress, Sarah, and a musician father. When McKay was seven his parents divorced. He attended Great Valley High School in Malvern, where he graduated in 1986. He then attended Pennsylvania State University for a year before transferring to Temple University, where he majored in English. McKay dropped out of Temple a semester-and-a-half before he was set to earn his bachelor's degree. He described it as "settling with an imaginary degree". He is one of the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv comedy group and a former performer at Chicago's ImprovOlympic, where he was a member of the improv group, The Family, whose members included Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Neil Flynn, Miles Stroth, and Ali Farahnakian, as well as Child's Play Touring Theatre. Career Writing, acting, and producing McKay originally auditioned for Saturday Night Live to be an onscreen performer, but did not make the cut. However, the