Damian Callinan

Damian Callinan is an actor and comedian from Melbourne, Australia. He has performed across many mediums, including TV, film, radio and live stand-up, acting in the Australian sketch comedy television series skitHOUSE, making regular appearances on Before the Game, and joining the cast of The Newsreader. According to Wikidata he was educated at RMIT University.

Callinan has staged numerous solo comedy shows. In 2006 he presented Damian Callinan has Spaznuts at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, a show about his fertility problems, and also debuted Babysitting that year. His other solo shows include Sportsman's Night, in which he performed every role in a story about a football club gathering with no props, as well as Last Drinks, Eureka Stocktake, The Cave to the Rave: The Story of Dance and Speech Night. In 2007 he appeared in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged alongside Frank Woodley and Keith Adams, and he launched his twelfth solo show, Swing Man, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2016.

His show The Merger, commissioned by Regional Arts Victoria and Vic Health to address racism in regional communities, was first performed in 2010 and tells the story of a struggling country football club that recruits newly arrived refugees. In 2017 it received funding from Screen NSW, and director Mark Grentell reteamed with Callinan to make the film version, also called The Merger, released across Australia in 2018 and later available on Netflix. In 2015 he took The Lost WWI Diary, a black-humour comedy based on a diary discovered in a Warrnambool op-shop, to the Adelaide Fringe Festival.