Guz Khan is developing something of a reputation as Mr Christmas. The comedian and actor is about to release Stuffed, a Lapland-set one-hour comedy co-starring Morgana Robinson. This time last year, he voiced a reindeer in the Richard Curtis animation That Christmas. Two years before that, he made a festive special with James Acaster testing the scientific validity of Home Alone.
“It sounds like, based on all the projects you’ve just listed there, Christmas paid for the extension on my house,” Khan booms down the phone. “Christmas is way better than Eid, bro, based on the facts that you’ve just given me.”
But if Stuffed represents Khan’s latest endeavour to become the face of Christmas, it’s one he seems slightly apprehensive about. If you’re familiar with his work, you’ll know how successfully he uses his garrulous personality and clusterbombing of the term “bro” (I count 46 uses in our interview) to camouflage a much more thoughtful intellect.
And Stuffed is definitely a departure. At this stage, Khan is best known for Man Like Mobeen, the peerless sitcom about life around Birmingham’s criminal underbelly he co-created with writer Andy Milligan. And despite being written by Milligan, Stuffed has a lot less bite. The story of a hard-up dad who uses his Christmas bonus to take his family on the holiday of a lifetime, only to realise that it was paid in error and has to be returned, is a broad, big-hearted family affair. Like all good Christmas shows, it balances humour with a sweet undercurrent of melancholy.
“Was it all right?” he asks, nervously. “You never know when you make something. I never thought we’d ever be in this kind of slot. There’s lots of things that come along with doing a Christmas special.”
How so? “A lot of the work I get asked to do is like: ‘Come in and do your thing.’ I just did season two of The Gentlemen, and it was such a fun week. There’s no rules. You can go absolutely crazy,” he explains. “But this was a little bit different. You have to follow some guidelines. And so it was a really good challenge for me. Where I’d usually express myself with dialogue, I had to try and get the same feeling with an expression.”
Getting to film in Lapland must have been special, though. “Most of it was made just off a roundabout in Reading, bro,” he replies, breaking the spell somewhat. “But when we did go to Lapland, I realised that somewhere deep down within me, my genetics were warning me about going to a country so cold. It’s everything you can imagine: really beautiful, lovely people. But my brown arse will never enter that place ever again. Unless the sequel is changed to somewhere warm with a beautiful beach, I’m out.”
What Stuffed does achieve, however, is something quietly groundbreaking. “I don’t know if at Christmastime there have been many depictions of interfaith couples,” he says. The central relationship in Stuffed is the marriage between Robinson’s Hannah (who celebrates Christmas) and Khan’s Arslan (who, as a Muslim, participates with a detached bewilderment). This element is buried deep inside the show, but it’s definitely there.
“It’s a really interesting dynamic,” says Khan. “They just live a normal life. There’s nothing aggy, nothing stressful. It’s all the stuff that any couple would go through. And for me and Andy, especially on Man Like Mobeen, so many people would say: ‘Isn’t that groundbreaking?’ We were like, ‘Not really.’ It’s just normal life. I suppose a lot of the country will tune in and be like: ‘OK, maybe that’s the first time I’ve seen it.’ Maybe it’ll piss some people off. And you know, that’s also part of the journey.”
It’s smart that you’re not underestimating the British public’s ability to be pissed off, I say. “Like my old mate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon,” he booms. “I’m gonna send him a link! I’m going to send him an early viewing link! I talk to him a lot on Instagram, so I might be like: ‘Steve, this one’s for you, baby boy.’”
Outside of his ongoing Christmas fixation, this has been another big year in a long succession of big years for Khan. In May, he released the final season of Man Like Mobeen, the show that made his name. And it’s testament to the show’s quality that it went out with the best run of episodes yet. Over the years, what started as a street-smart, silly sitcom about a former drug dealer gradually sharpened its edges. Life got harder for the characters. There was a death. By the end, the show resembled a thriller as much as a comedy.
“I feel like a personal responsibility that it wasn’t like Only Fools, right?” he says of the ending. “You don’t all end up with winning the lottery. In Small Heath and the West Midlands, we have some of the most dangerous levels of crime that we’ve seen on record. And to present Mobeen as like: ‘Oh yeah, what an amazing guy,’ you can’t do that. It’s a bad life. It’s a life that will ruin you, and you’ll lose the people closest to you, so we always wanted to keep that sense. I never want a kid to watch the show and be like: ‘I want to be like Mobeen.’ I want you to have the friendships that they’ve got, but I certainly don’t want you to have the lifestyle.”
Is this definitively the end? “It feels right for me personally, because that was based on one stage of my life from 20 years ago,” he says. “But now, with the size of my waist and all the good food that comes along with this game, I don’t feel like I’m the right guy to be telling the stories of Small Heath or any inner-city, working-class area. I want to see Girl Like Mobeen. I want to see that next generation. I still feel like bringing it to an end is the right thing. But we can never say never. I’d love to see what those characters look like in their late 50s, if we’re all still alive. So, yeah, definitely a special out there, but you never want to outstay your welcome.”
If anything, 2026 looks like it might be a bigger year still. As well as The Gentlemen, and an unscripted show entitled Guz Khan’s Custom Cars, there is one project he seems especially excited about: Riz Ahmed’s upcoming Prime Video comedy Bait.
“Riz is very excited about it, too,” he says. A show about a struggling actor thrust into an existential crisis after landing the role of a lifetime, the series was created by Ahmed, and at first glance sounds fairly autobiographical. “It’s the first time he’s created a show in nearly 27 years of acting, and it’s dropping next year,” continues Khan, who will play Ahmed’s cousin. “It’s his life story, and it’s an absolute honour to be part of it. He’s so proud that he gets to tell his story. And it blew my mind, bro, because when we were filming it, I was just talking about the context of making a show. And he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and he went: ‘Bro, I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and until now no one has ever asked me to do my own show. Just remember how lucky you were.”
Looking at Khan’s career so far, it’s hard to get a full sense of scale. He’s made his own show, and balanced it with roles in ever bigger international projects, such as Andy Samberg’s animated comedy Digman! and Rebel Wilson’s upcoming movie Girl Group. And, as previously stated, he has now become the walking image of Christmas incarnate. Does he even have any ambitions left?
“You know, fundamentally, what I have to do is raise these kids,” he says of his five children, who range from 11 months to 14 years old. “Now you mention it, though, you got me thinking. I worked with Idris Elba after only performing for a couple of years, and Pedro Pascal. I got to spend a week in a forest with Judi Love. Bro, my life is beyond crazy. But for as long as it lasts, for as long as this crazy rollercoaster we’re all on continues to go, I just want to work with good people and catch good vibes. And I’ve been very lucky so far, whether it’s stuff that I’ve created or whether I’ve been asked to go and do it. Just keep having fun with it, bro. And that’s the biggest thing. I’m not worried about Hollywood. We’re just trying to have fun, bro, for however long this theme park carries on.”
Stuffed is on BBC One on 23 December at 9pm.
