Background and career
David Andrew Jerome Samberg (born August 18, 1978) is an American actor, comedian, rapper, writer and producer. He is a member of the comedy music group the Lonely Island, along with childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Samberg was also a cast member and writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2012, where he and his fellow group members are credited with popularizing the SNL Digital Shorts. Samberg's starring film roles include Hot Rod (2007), That's My Boy (2012), Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012), Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016), and Palm Springs (2020). He has voiced roles in Space Chimps (2008), the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs film series (2009–present), the Hotel Transylvania film series (2012–present), Storks (2016), Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), and Zootopia 2 (2025). From 2013 to 2021, he portrayed Jake Peralta in the Fox/NBC police procedural sitcom series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which he also produced.
For his work on the show, he was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy in 2013.
Early life and education David Andrew Jerome Samberg was born in Berkeley, California, on August 18, 1978. His mother, Marjorie "Margi" (née Marrow), is a retired teacher, who taught at John Muir Elementary School, and his father, Joe Samberg, is a photographer. He has two older sisters, Johanna and Darrow. His family is Jewish, and Samberg described his upbringing as "I wouldn't say we're super-religious, but we're very much in touch with the cultural aspect of it." Samberg never had a bar mitzvah. He attended Chabot Elementary School with his future Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-star Chelsea Peretti. At age 5, he told his parents that he wanted to change his name to Andy. In a 2019 episode of Finding Your Roots, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Samberg discovered that his mother Marjorie, who was adopted by Jewish parents, is the biological daughter of a Sicilian Catholic father named Salvatore Maida, who immigrated in 1925, and a German Jewish refugee mother named Ellen Philipsborn, who had come to the U.S. in 1938; they met in San Francisco.
Samberg's adoptive maternal grandfather was industrial psychologist and philanthropist Alfred J. Marrow; through him, he is a third cousin of U.S. senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI). Samberg graduated from Berkeley High School in 1996, where he became interested in creative writing and has stated that writing classes "were the ones that I put all my effort into... that's what I cared about and that's what I ended up doing". He attended college at University of California, Santa Cruz, for two years before transferring to New York University (NYU)'s Tisch School of the Arts, where he graduated in 2000. While at NYU, writer Murray Miller was his roommate.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth, in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
