Mario Rosenstock discovered his marvellous tongue-twisting gift for mimicry when he was just five years of age.
“When you’re five, you’re at that age where you can talk and you can make your opinions known, but a lot of adults ignore you – especially your parents,” the 38-year-old actor, impressionist and now comedy gameshow panelist explains.

“They talk over you, and that used to drive me mad. And I remember thinking I needed to get their attention, but the screaming thing wasn’t working. So I did an impression of my dad arguing with my mother, and it stopped them in their tracks. I started doing his voice as a five-year-old could only do it, and it came out as a sort of Eastern European migrant’s voice. My mother started laughing and said to him, ‘That’s you!’ And my dad said the same thing everyone says when they hear themselves being done: ‘That is not me! That is nothing like me!’”
Chances are it was close enough to hit a nerve. As listeners to his hilarious Gift Grub sketches on Today FM’s Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show will be well aware, Rosenstock’s lampoons of Ireland’s politicians, sports stars and celebs can be quite lacerating. Disappointingly for his fellow students, he says he didn’t really exploit his talent for mimicry during his schooldays (“I got more into tennis, which is another form of performance really”).
However, when he went to Trinity to study economics and politics, he got well and truly bitten by the acting bug.
“I used to have to repeat my exams every September, because I’d basically have spent the whole year not attending lectures and doing shows with Trinity Players instead.”
After college, he worked with varying degrees of success as an actor, appearing in numerous theatrical productions and even making a movie with Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston (1998’s Miracle At Midnight). However, he properly came to the attention of the Irish public playing the role of Dr. David Hanlon in Glenroe in the 1990s.
Although he mostly enjoyed his stint on Glenroe, he maintains it often wasn’t very creatively satisfying.
“I remember one morning getting into make-up at 7am, getting a bus down to Wicklow, waiting there the whole day as my scene was put back and back and back, having had lunch and dinner, still in make-up, and eventually around 12 hours later I went into the bar for my scene and said, ‘I’ll have a coffee, Teasy,’ and they said, ‘That’s a wrap!’ It was just soul destroying, waiting around all day to speak a line that I wasn’t particularly inspired by, written by somebody else.”
When Today FM asked him to contribute comedy sketches to Ian Dempsey’s morning show in 1999, he jumped at the chance.
“Radio was an opportunity to write what you want to say, and make it interesting for yourself if you want to. Even if other people don’t find it funny, at least you’ve written it and you’ve said it and you’ve acted it. So it was a control thing, really. On Gift Grub, I could control what I was doing myself.”
On air for just over a decade, Gift Grub has spawned a series of hit spoken-word albums which collectively have now shifted more than half a million copies. The show’s massive popularity is down not only to his incredible mimicry of such public figures as Roy Keane, Bertie Ahern, Daniel O’Donnell and Michael D. Higgins, but also his ability to react with scalpel sharp satire to breaking news stories and current events.
Meanwhile, he’s also returning to television, as one of the team captains on RTE’s new Have I Got News For You?-style panel show, That’s All We Have Time For.
Although he unmercifully takes the piss out of them, Rosenstock claims that most Irish politicians are actually delighted to be ridiculed on the show.
“Politicians in Ireland are pathetic and craven when it comes to this kind of issue. They are actually dying to get onto it. They all love being on it. I think that says a lot about them, and how much they want to basically increase their public relations image. I remember being in the Burlington one night when the Bertie thing was at its height, Michael Noonan came up to my table and he went [goes into mimic mode] ‘I hear your stuff about Bertie on the radio – would you ever think about doing me, would’ya?’ He actually asked me if I’d do him!”
Needless to say, Rosenstock duly obliged.
“We started doing him – and we did him as a blustering buffoon who only talks in extended metaphors which go nowhere, to which Bertie can just go, ‘Listen, nobody has a fuckin’ clue what you’re talkin’ about so sit down, ya spanner!’”
Has anybody ever taken serious offence?
“Ronan Keating was the only person who initially took offence and he refused to go on the show to be interviewed by me as himself. But I think what happened was his friends really liked it so, anytime I was doing him, they’d call him up and go, ‘Ronan, this is funny. Yer man’s taking the piss out of you, but it’s still funny’. I think he then decided to embrace it. Remember he’d done a lot by the time he was 22, and he was probably quite impressionable, and he was probably going, ‘I’m Ronan Keating; who’s this fucker taking the piss out of me?’
“But then as he got older, hit 30 and stuff, he started to see it for what it was – you know, we’re all in the entertainment industry and this is what we do. And eventually he did come on the show and confessed that he loved it, and also that he called his boat Fair Play. Seriously, Ronan Keating has a boat – and he called it Fair Play! And I’ve subsequently met those guys from Boyzone, and they’re big slaggers themselves. They don’t take any prisoners, they really fucking give it to you!”
After Bertie resigned, Rosenstock had to learn how to imitate the gruff voice of Brian Cowen. Initially, it didn’t come easy.
“When I try to get a character, some come much easier than others. Initially I couldn’t find my way of doing Cowen. And you know when it’s not working, it doesn’t sound right and you’re faking it or whatever. And one day I was practising doing Cowen in a tape recorder at Today FM and I was eating my lunch while doing it. I was just stuffing my face, it was a chicken tikka sandwich, and reading my lines into the tape recorder. And as I was reading my lines, my mouth became completely obstructed with chicken tikka, and suddenly it sounded very like him.
“So for the next few weeks, anytime I was doing Cowen on the radio, I had to do it with a chicken tikka sandwich or a wrap in my mouth to get it to sound the way I wanted it. And I remember going on Tubridy Tonight and they asked me to do Cowen; I had to say, ‘Do you have a chicken tikka sandwich handy?’ But eventually I learned how to do it without the sandwich. Thankfully!”
2010 is shaping up to be a particularly busy year for Rosenstock. He’s just landed a gig as team captain on new RTE panel show That’s All We’ve Got Time For (alongside Barry Murphy and Kevin Myers), and in March he begins touring Gift Grub Live around Ireland. Most of the dates have already sold-out and he can’t wait to hit the road.
“The live show is the most magical thing that’s happened to me in the last 12 years,” he enthuses. “Because it is the absolute culmination of 10 or 12 years on the radio where you hear nobody laughing at what you say – and then putting it out in front of 1,200 people a night and hearing the response it gets. I’ve spent months putting it together with Ian, just chopping it down and making it really economical. Making sure that there’s a laugh every five seconds - a big one. There’s no fat on it hardly at all. It’s just going to be me and an interactive big screen, multiple costume changes and a heck of a lot going on. I really couldn’t be more satisfied with this project.”

Gift Grub Live comes to the Aura Leisure Centre, Letterkenny on April 10, the INEC, Killarney on May 8 and Dublin’s new Grand Canal Theatre on May 26 and 27.