Mitchell, Kel 1978–

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Kel Mitchell 1978–

Actor

Kel Mitchell is one of several actors and comedians whose careers were launched on Nickelodeon, the kids' cable channel, when they were still in their teens. Mitchell's trajectory began with a slot on Nickelodeon's sketch-comedy show All That in the mid-1990s, which led to a starring role as the hapless Ed in the 1997 comedy Good Burger.

Mitchell was born on August 25, 1978, in Chicago and was acting in community theater productions by the age of thirteen. Aria, a local talent agency, signed him with its film and television division after seeing one stage performance. He soon became a veteran of the auditioning process, but when invited to try out for a new series planned for Nickelodeon, the materials for the monologue he was supposed to perform were sent late, and he had little time to prepare; he also had two tests in school that day. “I messed up on it and I didn't really know it. So I came in there and I forgot it, I just went blank,” he told Allan Johnson in an article that appeared in the Buffalo News. The producers allowed him to do it over, suggesting he perform the monologue as a stand-up routine instead with some improvisation; he proved so skilled at the latter request that the producers did not hesitate in offering him a role on what would become Nickelodeon's version of Saturday Night Live, the long-running sketch-comedy series on NBC.

Mitchell was one of seven young actors and comedians who served as All That's cast in its first few seasons, along with Nick Cannon and Amanda Bynes. The series was taped at Nickelodeon's studios in Orlando, Florida, and Mitchell told very few of his friends back home in Chicago about the job. “I didn't want everybody to know, because I didn't want it to seem like I was stuck up,” he confessed in the interview with Johnson for the Buffalo News. Only during his senior year, when a new crop of freshman entered the school and recognized him from All That, did he become a minor celebrity at school.

One of his fellow cast mates on All That was Atlanta native Kenan Thompson, and the duo began teaming up for improvised bits. “The first time we really hit it off was when we played these two old men, Mavis and Clavis,” Mitchell told Mal Vincent of the Virginian Pilot. “They can't hear. They can't see. They're pretty funny. We were on the same wave.” The director of All That, Brian Robbins, saw the potential in the pair. “The chemistry between them—they had us dying on the first run-through,” Robbins recounted to Janet Weeks, a writer for the Los Angeles Daily News. “They had these brain waves. It was magic. After we did the first season of ‘All That,’ we all knew that these guys had to have their own show.”

That show was Kenan & Kel, which debuted on Nickelodeon in August of 1996. The sitcom featured the pair as longtime best friends who manage to find themselves in some sort of misadventure every week. The show ran for sixty-one episodes, and Mitchell and Thompson made cable history as the first African Americans to star in a series on Nickelodeon, one of the highest-rated basic-cable channels. “We feel blessed,” Mitchell enthused in an interview with Jet. “To be two African-Americans with this big of a fan base is great. We're like the hip hop Barney. Kids come up to us and say we're their role models.” They were not that far past their own childhoods, and early in their careers their mothers served as their on-set chaperones. “Kenan's mom is the real bulldog,” Mitchell revealed to Vincent in the Virginian Pilot article. “My mom just goos and says, ‘That's my baby up there.’”

Mitchell and Thompson kept their slots on the All That cast, and one of their recurring skits on the show led to a movie offer. Mitchell played Ed, a surfer type who works at a fast-food restaurant, with Thompson as his scheming coworker Dexter. Ed is devoted to his job, and the skit's trademark line as delivered by Mitchell was “Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger. Can I take your order?” The movie version of the skit, Good Burger, was released in 1997 and teamed the pair with a cast that included comedians Sinbad and Abe Vigoda, with appearances by Shaquille O'Neal and George Clinton. Variety gave it a terrific review, with critic Leonard Klady asserting the movie “has a trump card in the character of Ed, ingeniously played by Mitchell. Ed is in the American dramatic tradition of … yarns in which a country rube ventures to the big city and overcomes those who wish to exploit him. Honesty and integrity prevail against greed and corruption for him.”

Mitchell went on to appear in the big-budget film Mystery Men, a 1999 superhero spoof that also starred Ben Stiller, Greg Kinnear, Hank Azaria, Geoffrey Rush, and Janeane Garofalo. By then both Mitchell and Thompson were enrolled in classes at Santa Monica College, and Mitchell married in late 1999 and became a father. He was a regular performer on The Steve Harvey Show and appeared as the voice of T-Bone in a new animated series for PBS television based on the vintage children's book Clifford the Big Red Dog. He reprised the T-Bone part for a 2004 film adaptation, Clifford's Really Big Movie.

In 2004 Mitchell became the cohost of Dance 360, a new series for the United Paramount Network (UPN). A combination dance-party/elimination contest, Dance 360 teamed him with Fredro Starr, a rapper from New York. It failed to last more than a season, but Mitchell went on to appear in the UPN sitcom One on One in 2005. He played Manny, the former child-television star owner of a house in Venice Beach rented out to several college students.

In 2007 Mitchell appeared in X's & O's, a romantic comedy with a multiethnic cast, and in the John Sayles film Honeydripper, which was set in the rural South of the early 1950s and starred Danny Glover as the owner of a failing blues bar.

At a Glance …

Born Kel Johari Rice Mitchell on August 25, 1978, in Chicago, IL; married Tyisha Hampton-Mitchell, October 16, 1999 (divorced, 2005); children: Allure, Lyric. Education: Attended Santa Monica College.

Career: Appeared in Chicago-area community theater productions and signed with Aria, a modeling and talent agency, c. 1991; made television debut in All That, 1995, and film debut in Good Burger, 1997.

Addresses: Web—http://www.myspace.com/therealkelmitchell.