Early Life
Helms was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, Pamela (née Parker), was a school administrator, and his father, John Helms, was an attorney. He graduated from The Westminster Schools in 1992 a year after his Office co-star Brian Baumgartner. Originally a geology major, Helms graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in film theory and technology in 1996 and spent a semester as an exchange student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
After graduating from Oberlin, Helms began his comedy and acting career as a writer and performer with New York City sketch comedy bands, and studied improvisation with the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe. Helms concurrently worked as a trainee film editor at Crew Cuts, a post-production facility in New York City. While doing so, he recorded some rough voiceover scratch tracks that eventually led to paying voiceover work, which in turn led to finding a talent agent.
Read more about this topic: Ed Helms
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“With only one life to live we can’t afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)