Phil Hendrie

Career

Philip Stephen Hendrie (born September 1, 1952, Arcadia, California) is the host of The Phil Hendrie Show, a comedy talk radio program syndicated throughout North America on Premiere Radio Networks and on XM Satellite Radio. While The Phil Hendrie Show has become renowned for its unique and controversial guests, those guests are not real people at all—they are fictional characters created and voiced by Hendrie himself.

Hendrie has also performed voices on the animated FOX sitcoms King of the Hill and Futurama, and in the 2004 film Team America: World Police. In Spring of 2006, he had a supporting role in the short-lived, live-action NBC sitcom Teachers.

His first on-air disc-jockey job was at WBJW AM, an adult contemporary station in Orlando, Florida. This began a 15-year radio career in which he went from Orlando to New Orleans to Miami to San Diego. By the late eighties, he was back in California, on KVEN AM in Ventura. It was here that the Phil Hendrie Show was born, and his first character was Raj Faneen. Phil then moved to Minneapolis and then to Miami where he further developed his show. The show then moved to KFI in Los Angeles, CA and has since been nationally syndicated to approximately 100 radio stations. In February 2005, Phil moved from his flagship station, KFI, to XTRA Sports 570, a sports talk station also centered in Los Angeles.

Hendrie was married in 1997 to former radio talk show host Maria Sanchez. Hendrie helps raise Sanchez's four children from a previous marriage. The wedding was held at the Queen Mary and was broadcast live on KFI. Part of the ceremony is on a hidden track on The Best of KFI's Phil Hendrie 1997 "Still On The Air", about a minute after the last track plays.

In early 2006, Phil announced that he would be ending The Phil Hendrie Show, feeling he'd reached the limits of what he could do in "terrestrial talk radio". Barring an appropriate offer from either of the two satellite radio companies, Hendrie expects to shift his career focus to acting. His last radio broadcast was for June 23, 2006.

Phil Hendrie returned to radio almost exactly a year later in June 2007 with The New Phil Hendrie Show with Talk Radio Network.