Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Mintz-Plasse in 2013
Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Born	Christopher Charles Mintz-Plasse 6/20/1989
Birthplace	Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actor, musician
Known for	Superbad, Kick-Ass, How to Train Your Dragon
Education	El Camino Real Charter High School

Christopher Charles Mintz-Plasse (born June 20, 1989) is an American actor and musician. He made his feature film debut at age seventeen as Fogell — better known by the alias on his fake identification, "McLovin" — in the 2007 Judd Apatow-produced comedy Superbad. The performance, his first professional acting credit, became one of the most recognizable comedic debuts of the 2000s and led to an extended career in studio comedy, animation, and horror.

Following Superbad, Mintz-Plasse worked steadily across genres, taking on the role of Chris D'Amico / Red Mist in Kick-Ass (2010) and its 2013 sequel, voicing Fishlegs in the How to Train Your Dragon animated franchise, and appearing in films including Role Models (2008), Year One (2009), the Fright Night remake (2011), and ParaNorman (2012). Alongside acting, he is a working bass player whose touring work in 2025 included dates with Ben Kweller's band.

Early life

Mintz-Plasse was born on June 20, 1989, in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles and attended El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills, where he was a student at the time he auditioned for Superbad. He has described his upbringing as suburban and theatre-oriented rather than industry-connected; he participated in school plays before pursuing professional work.

Mintz-Plasse went on to attend the University of California, Riverside following the success of Superbad, balancing higher education with film projects in the immediate aftermath of his debut. In interviews from the period, he discussed maintaining a sense of normalcy while his profile rose, noting that the casting of Superbad had pulled him into the film industry abruptly and without prior credits.

Career

Superbad and breakthrough

Mintz-Plasse was cast in Superbad through an open audition process while still a high school student. He had no prior on-screen acting credits at the time of casting. The film, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and directed by Greg Mottola, was released by Columbia Pictures on August 17, 2007. In it, Mintz-Plasse played Fogell, a soft-spoken classmate of the two leads (played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) whose fake Hawaiian driver's license — bearing only the single name "McLovin" — becomes the engine of much of the film's plot.

Roger Ebert, reviewing the film for the Chicago Sun-Times, singled out Mintz-Plasse's debut performance and the McLovin alias as a central comic device of the film. The character's name and yellow Hawaiian license became durable elements of late-2000s pop culture, and the role remains the one most frequently associated with Mintz-Plasse in press and convention appearances nearly two decades later.

In interviews surrounding the film's reissues and anniversaries, Seth Rogen has stated that he believes Superbad could not be produced today, citing changes in studio risk tolerance for R-rated teen comedies featuring unknown lead actors.

Continued film work (2008–2013)

After Superbad, Mintz-Plasse appeared in Role Models (2008), the Harold Ramis-directed comedy Year One (2009), and Kick-Ass (2010), directed by Matthew Vaughn and adapted from the Mark Millar comic book. In Kick-Ass, he played Chris D'Amico, the privileged son of a mob boss who adopts the costumed alter ego Red Mist. He reprised the role in Kick-Ass 2 (2013), in which the character is rebranded as the villain "The Motherfucker."

In 2010, he was cast in the DreamWorks remake of Fright Night, released in 2011, in which he played "Evil" Ed alongside Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell. In press for the film, Mintz-Plasse stated that he was actively seeking darker and more dramatic material to broaden his profile beyond comedy. He also voiced Fishlegs Ingerman in How to Train Your Dragon (2010), a role he reprised in the sequels How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019), as well as in associated television specials.

In 2012, Mintz-Plasse provided the voice of Norman's bully Alvin in Laika's stop-motion film ParaNorman.

Television and short-form work

Mintz-Plasse starred in the CBS sitcom Friend Me, which was developed and ordered to series but ultimately shelved by the network and never aired. He also participated in The Far Cry Experience, a web series tied to the video game Far Cry 3 and hosted on YouTube. Among his short-form credits is the comedy short You're So Hot, co-starring Dave Franco and directed by Brian McGinn.

He has appeared in additional comedies through the 2010s, and remained associated with the broader Apatow comedy ensemble through projects including Neighbors (2014), in which he returned to a college-aged fraternity setting opposite Rogen.

Music

In parallel with his acting career, Mintz-Plasse has worked as a musician, primarily as a bass player. He was a member of the band The Young Rapscallions. In a 2025 interview at MCM London Comic Con, he discussed the role that touring and bass playing have played in sustaining the longevity of his creative work alongside acting.

In October 2025, Parade reported that Mintz-Plasse was preparing to tour as a member of Ben Kweller's band, performing a string of dates as a working bassist rather than as a celebrity guest. During the same period, he made a surprise on-stage appearance at the King Tut's Wah Wah Hut venue in Glasgow while in the United Kingdom for the comic convention circuit.

Convention and press appearances

Mintz-Plasse has remained an active presence on the fan convention circuit, drawing on the continued cultural recognition of both McLovin and his superhero and animation roles. He was a featured guest at MCM London Comic Con in October 2025, where organisers promoted his Superbad and How to Train Your Dragon work, and was announced as a guest at Geek'd Con 2026 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Press coverage from his 2025 UK appearances noted his willingness to engage with the McLovin character's enduring fan base while emphasizing his current focus on music and longer-form acting projects.

Personal life

Mintz-Plasse became engaged to concert photographer Britt Bowman in December 2022. The couple's relationship had been publicly documented for several years prior to the engagement, and Bowman's professional work in music photography overlapped with Mintz-Plasse's involvement in the touring music scene.

He is based in Los Angeles. In interviews, he has described splitting his time between film and television acting commitments and live music touring, and has spoken about the difficulty and reward of sustaining a long career after an unusually high-profile debut.

Recognition

Mintz-Plasse's debut performance in Superbad has been singled out repeatedly in retrospectives of 2000s American comedy, with the McLovin character and fake ID frequently cited as one of the defining comic images of the decade. Roger Ebert's contemporary review highlighted the character as a comic centrepiece of the film.

His role as Red Mist / Chris D'Amico in the Kick-Ass films brought him into the comic book adaptation space during the genre's commercial expansion in the early 2010s, and his voice work as Fishlegs across the How to Train Your Dragon franchise placed him in one of DreamWorks Animation's longest-running and most commercially successful properties of the 2010s. Convention promoters and entertainment outlets continue to bill him in terms of all three franchises — Superbad, Kick-Ass, and How to Train Your Dragon — when announcing public appearances.