Darren John Boyd is an English actor. He starred in the Sky One series Spy, for which he won the 2012 BAFTA TV Award for Best Male Comedy Performance. His work in television and film spans comedy and drama.
Boyd was born in Hastings, Sussex, and began acting at the age of 16, in local theatre productions.
Boyd co-starred in the BBC comedy Kiss Me Kate (1998), which ran for three years and led to starring roles in British comedies including Hippies (1999), with Simon Pegg, and Smack the Pony (1999). In 2001, Boyd was co-creator and co-writer with Victoria Pile on Los Dos Bros, an off-beat sitcom exploring physical comedy and the relationship between Boyd and Cavan Clerkin as the titular half brothers. The show won a silver rose at Montreux in 2002. During this time Boyd starred alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the NBC series Watching Ellie.
Boyd returned to the UK in 2005, and took roles including Dr. Jake Leaf in the second series of Green Wing (2006) and Jonathan in Steve Coogan's Saxondale. In 2009, he appeared in the two-part adaptation of May Contain Nuts, based on John O'Farrell's novel Personal Affairs for BBC Three, and Royal Wedding (2010), which follows the 1981 Royal Wedding through the perspective of events in a Welsh mining village, written by Abi Morgan and starring Jodie Whittaker.
Boyd starred as Bib in the 2010 BBC sitcom Whites, and co-starred in the BBC Four drama Dirk Gently playing Dirk Gently's business partner Richard MacDuff from 2010 to 2012. In 2011 Boyd played John Cleese in Holy Flying Circus, a 90-minute dramatisation of the controversy over the 1979 release of Monty Python's Life of Brian.
From 2011 to 2013, Boyd starred in the Sky One series Spy, which won him BAFTA Television Award for Best Male Comedy Performance, and also starred in two ITV dramas, Case Sensitive, a series adapted from Sophie Hannah's novel Point of Rescue alongside Olivia Williams, and three-part drama The Guilty.
In 2014, Boyd was reunited with his Watching Ellie costar Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a guest appearance on her HBO series Veep in the episode "Special Relationship".
Boyd played Markus Huseklepp as part of the ensemble cast of Sky Atlantic drama series Fortitude, which premiered in 2015. He briefly returned to comedy in the lead role of Matthew Bunting in the ITV sitcom The Delivery Man.
In 2016, he appeared in dramatic roles opposite Idris Elba in the fourth series of Luther, and opposite James Nesbitt in Stan Lee's Lucky Man.
In 2018, Boyd played Frank Haleton in the British BBC drama series Killing Eve. In 2019, Boyd provided the voice of Mr. Brown in The Adventures of Paddington which aired on the Nick Jr. Channel in 2020.
He played Supt. Dave Minty in the fact-based 2020 BBC drama The Salisbury Poisonings.
Cameos include an evangelical vicar in Rev. and ex-athlete Dave Wellbeck in BBC Olympics mockumentary Twenty Twelve.
In 2021, Boyd appeared in the BBC series The Outlaws.
Boyd has appeared in feature films including High Heels and Low Lifes (2002), Imagine Me & You (2005), Magicians (2007), Chris Morris' Four Lions (2010), The World's End (2013), ' (2013), ' (2017) and The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019).
Boyd starred as a reluctant arms dealer in the BBC Radio 4 sitcom Safety Catch. He co-starred in ElvenQuest, another Radio 4 sitcom, as Vidar the Elf Lord. In 2018, he appeared as a suspect in the Radio 4 drama, A Small Town Murder.