Peep Show favourite Matt King has opened up about ending his 30-year marriage — and how that private collapse collided with a life-threatening spinal stroke.
Speaking on Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, as reported by The Sun, King, 58, said he threw himself into writing Moreish — a fictional Super Hans autobiography — while separating from his wife. “I was going through a separation, divorce with my missus of 30 years at the time. And so threw myself into this,” he recalled, describing intense writing bursts that let him stay inside the character’s world and avoid “the real stuff” happening behind him. He has two children and did not detail why the marriage ended.
The split came before April 2026, when King suffered a rare spinal-cord stroke. He has said he woke up on the floor of his home paralysed from the neck down and was rushed to the Royal Sussex County Hospital. Feeling returned to his hands after about 36 hours; he spent two weeks in hospital, faced speech and memory problems, and had to relearn walking and writing. He later cancelled a Super Hans book-signing tour while recovering. King credited an unnamed new partner with helping him through the hardest stretch after discharge and said he can now walk two to three miles several times a week.
Best known as drug-addled Super Hans opposite David Mitchell and Robert Webb, King kept his marriage largely out of the spotlight for three decades. The podcast comments are the clearest public account yet of both the divorce timeline and how the stroke still shapes his work and recovery.
