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Bill Bellamy

Bill Bellamy has built a screen career around the same quick, personable energy that made him a familiar face on MTV. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on April 7, 1965, Bellamy attended Seton Hall Preparatory School before majoring in economics at Rutgers University. Comedy and television ultimately became his lane, with acting, hosting and voice work giving that career an unusually broad shape. For years, Bellamy was a staple of MTV, working as a VJ and hosting programs including MTV Jams and MTV Beach House. That ease in front of an audience carried naturally into film. His credits include the action movie Fled, the romantic drama Love Jones, the ensemble comedy-drama The Brothers, How to Be a Player, Getting Played and Oliver Stone’s football drama Any Given Sunday. Across those projects, Bellamy found room for both his comic instincts and a more grounded dramatic presence. His television work has been just as varied. Bellamy appeared in two episodes of Kenan & Kel and voiced Skeeter on Nickelodeon’s Cousin Skeeter. In 2002, he co-starred with Peter Facinelli and Tiffani Thiessen in the Fox series Fastlane. He later hosted the fifth and sixth seasons of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, as well as Bill Bellamy’s Who’s Got Jokes?, for which he also served as an executive producer. Bellamy continued moving between comedy, drama and hosting work, taking a recurring role as Councilman Powell on Hot in Cleveland in 2014. He played FBI Agent Sanders in Kindergarten Cop 2 in 2016 and starred in the Netflix miniseries Self Made in 2020. He also voiced the playable character Marcus Hill in the 2005 version of the video game NARC. It is a career defined less by one signature format than by Bellamy’s ability to remain at home across movies, television, comedy and voice performance.