Oobah Butler is a lot of things. A #1 fake restauranteur. Paris Fashion Week’s top fake designer. The host of MTV’s Catfish UK. A bestselling LA Times author. Oobah's brain works… differently. Despite having no formal qualifications, he’s made a name for himself over the past years by achieving against all odds with little in his pockets and a comical, outside-of-the-box way of thinking.
For example, after discovering that the world’s biggest travel website, TripAdvisor, wasn’t completely legitimate, he spent six months transforming his garden shed into the platform’s #1 restaurant. The heist dominated the world news and attracted over 100 million views upon releasing a documentary about it.
But that’s not all of it.
When struggling Zambian denim designer Georgio Peviani entered his life, Oobah adopted a persona that made waves at Paris Fashion Week – with a pair of £20 jeans.
More recently, Oobah has been working with his ‘app’, which enables people to order lookalikes of themselves to do something either they don’t want to do or wish they could do a better job of. Thousands have contacted him for his help, most interestingly documented in his November 2020 VICE film, Sending A Lookalike to My High School Reunion. The viral film is both heartwarming and hilarious, resulting in Oobah being hailed by the AV Club as “probably the best prankster working in the world today.”
In March 2021, it was announced that Oobah would be co-hosting the first UK version of the hit American show, Catfish, alongside Julie Adenuga on MTV worldwide. The series trended in both the UK and US, featured on Gogglebox multiple times and made international news headlines. It has just finished its third season with Butler joined by Nella Rose for series 2 and 3.
Most recently, at the end of 2023, Butler's groundbreaking TV documentary, "The Great Amazon Heist", captivated audiences worldwide and broke news as a series of viral stunts about the corporate monolith. This film was hailed in a 5-star review by The Daily Telegraph as an “ingenious exposé” and a sign that Butler has matured without losing what has made his career so explosive to date.
Over the past few years, he's received four awards for his work; Best Use of Video: Weird at the 2019 Webby Awards; Content Creator of the Year 2018 at The Drum Online Media Awards, Video Project of the Year 2018 at the British Media Awards and Best Content Idea - Digital 2018 at the British Society of Magazine Editors Talent Awards. In 2023, Butler won Best TV Presenter at the National Reality TV Awards.
Oobah Butler is represented by agents Thomas Cook for unscripted, Greg Cavic for motion pictures and major projects, and Ross Wiggins for scripted cinema at UTA.