James Acaster

James William Acaster (born January 9, 1985, Kettering, Northamptonshire, England) is an English stand-up comedian, actor, and podcaster. After playing drums in local bands he began pursuing stand-up comedy professionally in 2008, quickly drawing attention at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where he earned a record-breaking five nominations for Best Comedy Show. His distinctive style blends long-form storytelling, absurdist scenarios, and elaborate recurring characters.

Acaster's profile grew internationally in 2018 when Netflix released Repertoire, a four-part stand-up collection covering four of his Edinburgh shows with an overarching narrative structure, making him the first UK comedian to release more than one Netflix Original stand-up special. His following tour Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 (2019) won a Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award, and his 2022 tour Hecklers Welcome was released as an HBO Max special in 2024. He also co-hosts the food podcast Off Menu with comedian Ed Gamble and appeared as a contestant on the panel show Taskmaster in 2018.

In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Acaster plays Lars Pinfield, the resident parabiologist of the Ghostbusters Engineer Corps who develops new ghostbusting technology. Lars sought out Winston Zeddemore and joined the corps, where he works at the Paranormal Research Center. In the film he takes readings of the Containment Unit after it is struck by the Death Chill, briefs the Spengler family on the unit's design and capacity problems, and demonstrates the Ionic Separator, a device capable of extracting ghosts from possessed objects. He also plays a central role in the investigation of the Garraka orb, nearly losing his hand to the artifact's extreme cold during a handling test. During his second audition for the film Acaster was asked to improvise Ghostbusters technobabble, a task that suited his facility with absurdist comedy.