Robert Llewellyn is an English actor, comedian, presenter and writer, born on 10 March 1956 in Northampton, England. He is best known for playing the mechanoid Kryten in the BBC science-fiction sitcom Red Dwarf, and for presenting Channel 4’s engineering gameshow Scrapheap Challenge.
Before turning to comedy, Llewellyn trained as a shoemaker in London. He helped form the alternative comedy group The Joeys, and it was his one-man Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, Mammon, Robot Born of Woman — about a robot slowly turning human — that led Red Dwarf producer Paul Jackson to invite him to audition for the series. Llewellyn joined the cast as Kryten in 1989, at the start of the show’s third series.
Alongside acting, Llewellyn has built a long career as a television presenter and author. He has written more than a dozen books, including the Red Dwarf memoir The Man in the Rubber Mask and the science-fiction trilogy that begins with News from Gardenia. In later years he became a prominent advocate for electric vehicles and renewable energy, founding and hosting the YouTube series Fully Charged.
Llewellyn was born and raised in England, and no specific Welsh town or family origin has been documented for him. Reference sources describe him as being of Welsh ancestry on the strength of his surname, and Llewellyn has himself joked, when asked directly, that he is “as Welsh as a croissant.”