Peep Show star Matt King reveals frustrating effect of recent stroke

This man is not Super Hans; he merely has Super Hans’ face and voice (Courtesy of Matt King) Saying, ‘Hello Simon’ is not how you should start an interview with someone called Matt. Yet this embarrassing blunder was, in many ways, an awkward but apt way to kick off an interview with Matt King, who’s spent the last two decades or so being treated as if he really were his infamous alter ego: Simon (if that was his real name), aka Super Hans. Hans, for those who need reminding, was Peep Show’s Coldplay-hating, crack-addled maniac, and arguably the third main character of the cult sitcom. ‘People only ever come up to me and ask “Are you, Super Hans?”’ Matt told Metro over Zoom. ‘They will never say “Are you the actor, Matt King?” Maybe one in a hundred.’ ‘It’s like a tattoo. I can’t get rid of it. I have his face, and I have his voice. Very few people come up to me in the street and call me Matt.’ Is it any surprise then that Matt admitted there was a brief time when he loathed the fame playing Super Hans had brought him? ‘I definitely went through a period of three or four years where I despised this man,’ he explained. Have a Coke and a tuna sandwich, just relax and read this book (Picture: HarperCollins) ‘I was trying to carve out a career as a serious actor. ‘I was getting knockback after knockback for really good projects because agents were like: “We love him, but he’s Super Hans”.’ It wasn’t just fans who struggled to see past Hans’ eyeliner and skinny jeans. ‘A couple of my acting agents that I’ve been with over the last 20 years have said that to me. They have to try and convince people, and often people won’t be convinced. ‘They’ll go, “He looks like Super Hans. So in people’s minds he is. He can’t be a sniper in World War 2. Because they’re going to go Super Hans sniping in World War 2. What’s going on there?”’ What you can’t see in this photo is that his bottom half is on fire (Picture: Channel 4) As Matt said, he wanted to be a distinguished older actor, but having Hans’ face held him back. Yet, as he’s got older, his relationship with Super Hans has changed in more ways than one. Ten weeks before our conversation, Matt suffered a stroke, and when we had our call, he was still under the care of the stroke team at the Royal Sussex, and one of the effects he’s been dealing with is occasionally losing his train of thought mid-conversation. It happens during our interview. We’ll be talking, and he suddenly loses track of what he was saying, pauses, and then explains, with a slight note of frustration: ‘This is one of the things that happens when you’ve had a stroke, by the way.’​ Matt’s been recovering from a stroke for the last few months (Picture: @RealMattKing/X) ‘One of the things that I’ve learned about having a stroke in the last ten weeks is that you can be mid-conversation with anyone, and then your brain just goes. I don’t remember anything that I was just saying and then it comes back eventually.’ I’m not breaking any confidences here. Matt said he didn’t mind me mentioning it, hoping it would put to bed some of the more sensational speculation about him being completely paralysed. But the stroke hasn’t stopped him from working. If anything, the last few years seem to have given him a different perspective on the character he once resented. Specifically, as he’s got older, Matt’s come to appreciate Hans (it turns out the secret ingredient was time), and in 2016 he did something neither Hans nor Jeremy ever could: he played Glastonbury. ‘I took Super Hans on the road,’ Matt smiled before admitting he never expected, as he approached his fifties, to be dancing around on stage in a fur coat in the wee hours of the morning. ‘It was the first and only time I’d ever been to Glastonbury,’ he explained. ‘It was a massive success, and Fatboy Slim’s manager came and said: “Do you want to do a national tour?” So that’s how Glastonbury went from a one-off gig to a nationwide one-and-a-half-year tour.’ While on the road, Matt realised something: he was lucky enough to be in one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, playing a character people wanted to hang out with, so he decided to embrace it. Which brings me very belatedly to the reason Matt and I are talking: after the tour, HarperCollins approached Matt to write a Super Hans book revealing what the character had been up to in the last decade. It’s somehow been more than ten years since we last saw (Picture: Peep Show) ‘I immediately thought, it’s a great idea,’ Matt said before adding: ’It was also the 10-year anniversary of [Peep Show] ending last year, so I was feeling a little bit weepy-eyed about it.’ Titled Moreish: My Mad Autobiography is a sort of Hunter S. Thompson-style memoir that tracks Super Hans’ time in Macedonia running a moped rental business, touching on the hitherto unexplained parts of Hans’ life. The book manages to be both brilliantly funny and oddly insightful without ever spoiling Hans’ mystique. Now I should warn people: this is not a Peep Show recap book; you won’t be getting Hans’s perspective on classic episodes. It’s a completely new story. The thing about this book is, it’s incredibly Moreish (Picture: Peep Show/Channel 4) Part of that is for contractual reasons (Matt says he was specifically barred from mentioning the lore of Peep Show), but also because he wasn’t really interested in retreading old ground. ‘I wouldn’t want to tarnish the panacea, the main series of Peep Show, and all the work of Sam and Jesse and Simon Blackwell and everyone else put in to make it,’ he explained. ‘I wanted to start it when he leaves. It starts a year after he moves to Macedonia to start up the moped business. The Peep Show lot (Picture: Dave Hogan/Getty Images) ‘It just proved the perfect jumping-off point for this whole story: so while I’m not allowed to write about Peep Show, I can write about his childhood and his growing up, which is what I wanted to do in the first place. ‘I wanted it to offer insight into why he is the person he is, but without turning it into a sort of fake misery memoir.’ And if you’re worried about the book lacking the magic that made Peep Show brilliant without Mark and Jez, the pair do make brief appearances, plus it’s got the seal of approval from Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. ‘Thankfully, the biggest sort of miracle in all of this is that Sam and Jesse trusted me with their golden child,’ Matt laughed. ‘I told them what I wanted to do with it, and they got really excited. That’s been one of the greatest things that’s come out of this is the trust that Sam and Jesse have put in me to hopefully not mess this up.’ There’s a certain irony in all this, of course, that Matt, who lived with Hans’ face and voice, now worries he might mess up his story. But as someone who found Moreish… well, moreish… I can tell you there’s no one more qualified to continue Hans’s story than Matt King. Although I probably shouldn’t call him Simon again… Deals of the Day Oodie’s cosy blanket sale has arrived just in time for Christmas shopping Save over £700 on Simba's top-rated mattresses in this limited-time sale Topman’s new-season collection has arrived and prices start at just £10 An Instagram mattress left me with back pain – this one completely changed my mind From £700 MacBooks to discounted iPhones, the best Apple tech for studentsb Moreish by Super Hans (HarperCollins, £20) publishes 24 September 2026 and is also available in ebook and audio. 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