6ft 7in Stephen Merchant finds love, at long last
TV’s tallest performer stephen Merchant, 43, famously lamented that he couldn’t get a date because of his 6ft 7in frame as well as his English reticence.
Now I hear the beanpole comic, who established his reputation co-writing The Office and then co-writing and starring in Extras alongside pint-sized Ricky Gervais, is going steady.
He is escorting stunning blonde American model and actress, the 5ft 6in Mircea Monroe, 36, a former cover girl for lads’ mag Maxim. But Mircea is not just a pretty face — she studied at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
so what is the secret of his new-found romance, of the sort that eluded stuart Pritchard — the socially inept Englishman living in Los Angeles, desperate to find his dream woman — who Merchant played in his sitcom, Hello Ladies? Maybe a new-found confidence boost? His company, ssJM Limited — which Merchant established in 2002 when co-writing The Office with Gervais — has accumulated £16million, an increase of £2.3million on the £13.7 million it held the previous year.
A statement filed at Companies House records that Merchant is the company’s sole shareholder.
‘I was trying for years to woo people through humour,’ he reflected a while ago, ‘but it seems flash cars are much easier.’
In 2014, he shelled out £2.4 million for a gated house in Los Angeles once owned by U.s. comedian and TV host Ellen DeGeneres and subsequently re-built by DeGeneres’s former girlfriend, actress and director Alexandra Hedison. That may help, too.