Adam McKay
Academy Award-winning writer/director/producer Adam McKay made his name in the comedy world when he served as head writer for SNL and later co-wrote and directed numerous iconic comedies such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (which was named one of the WGA’s 101 Funniest Screenplays), Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers. McKay's last feature, Don’t Look Up, received four Academy Award and BAFTA nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a WGA Original Screenplay win for McKay. Don't Look Up is one of Netflix’s most successful films of all time and stars Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy Earth.
McKay’s 2018 feature, Vice, received eight Academy Award nominations, six Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, a WGA nomination as well as earned WGAW’s 2019 Paul Selvin Award for his screenplay, and a DGA nomination for McKay. In 2015, McKay and Charles Randolph adapted Michael Lewis’s New York Times best-selling book, The Big Short. McKay earned Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Director, and he and Randolph won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, BAFTA, WGA and USC Scripter Awards. In 2021, The Big Short was named one of WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (*so far). Other recent work includes his role as a producer on Searchlight Pictures' social thriller Fresh starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan, directed by Mimi Cave and written by Lauryn Kahn. He also served as an executive producer on Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart, Netflix’s Dead to Me and writer/director Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers.
For television, McKay is an executive producer on the critically acclaimed HBO show Succession. McKay directed the pilot for which he won the 2018 DGA Award for Drama Series. The show won the 2019 BAFTA for Best International Series and the 2020 EMMY and Golden Globe for Best Drama Series. Most recently, he executive produced and directed the pilot of HBO’s drama series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. He is also an executive producer on HBO's late night series Game Theory with Bomani Jones. McKay's upcoming work includes the HBO limited series inspired by Bong Joon Ho's Academy Award Best Picture Parasite, a limited series based on Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown’s book about Jeffrey Epstein and an HBO anthology series adapted from David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.
McKay’s production company, Hyperobject Industries, has a wide-ranging focus from comedies, dramas, horror, documentaries, and documentary-series, that cover politically charged and challenging subjects with which McKay has become synonymous.