One Half Minute of Fame - Tracking Actors Through Commercials

It's been going on three years now that I've been doing this. I can't help it. I just can't forget a face.

If the waitress from Progressive ends up being the girlfriend with the stinky boyfriend in a Voltswagen, how am I not supposed to notice when she pops up in the Taco Bell commercial? You see my dilemma.

This has led me to some pretty odd knowledge, which I'm about to share with all of you here. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the actress in the ads I just mentioned, however I do have three other items to discuss here today, Nate Torrence, the cavemen and Justin Long.

This is all in chronological order according to how I became fans of these people and where they've gone. First off we have Mr. Torrence, who I first noticed in another VW commercial. It was during that series of ads they had with the recurring actor playing the test driver. During one of those, a young man was instructed to speed up while rounding a curve. As he does, he let's out a kind of squeal of delight, and then screams at the car next to them. That screamer is Nate Torrence.

He really came into power in the commercial world, though, as David Spade's bumbling sidekick in the Capital One series. When Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was still airing, you could catch glimpses of him in the writers' room. Probably my favorite role of his, however, was as Moose, who rents an Enterprise car for his high school reunion.

With a little googling I found that he was from the Second City in Chicago, an ongoing improv group where a lot of SNL people get their start. Since then I've seen him written up in several other places, including USA Today after he had appeared in Click with Adam Sandler. Apparently Sandler had specifically asked for him after seeing his commercials.

Next we have the cavemen. A lot of people think that the first Geico cavemen commercial includes the roast duck with the mango salsa. This is not true.

The very first commercial has the same beginning with the man saying "it's so easy even a caveman could do it," but instead of the shot switching to the restaurant scene, the camera pulls back to show the studio and one of the cavemen just shouts "Nice" and throws down the boom mic. The first time I saw that I thought it was hilarious.

The roast duck with the mango salsa, which I also found to be extremely funny when I first saw it, has become one of the most viral things in television advertising, like a gold standard for marketing firms to look up to when trying to create that one thing that everyone talks about and references.

However, it unfortunately led to the extension of the series of commercials, half of which are pretty weak sauce. Some of the new ones have their moments, but none of them are as fresh and well done as those first two. Now it's going to be a TV series, and although I haven't seen the pilot myself, it has been getting trashed by the critics who have had that opportunity.

For a while I thought that the main caveman from the commercials (not sure if they're the same actors from the upcoming show) was the same actor who, on Heroes, plays the nuclear man. Wikipedia's page of that actor, Matthew John Armstrong, says that he's commonly mistaken for the Geico caveman. Apparently he addressed it in an Entertainment Weekly interview.

Lastly we have Mr. Long. You all probably know him best as Mac, from the Mac and PC commercials. Originally it was my brother who pointed him out to me, stating that he was a fan (this was told to me with the knowledge that I already paid unusual attention to TV ads and the actors in them).

I knew who he was talking about, but hadn't really taken notice. So I started to keep my eyes on him. I didn't recognize him again until I was watching Mike Judge's Idiocracy, where Long has some classic lines as the doctor. My favorite term that I've picked up from that scene is "Scro," (not sure how's that's supposed to be spelled) which is used in the same fashion as "Bro" (as in, "Don't sweat it, Scro").

I actually fell asleep to that movie one night and that was one of the last things that I noticed. Literally right before falling asleep I thought to myself, "Hey, it's Mac." The next day we played a show in New York at the Cake Shop, and while I was outside smoking a cigarette in the doorway of the apartment building next door (to protect myself from the cold wind), three people were coming out and I had to move.

I made eye contact with one of them, my immediate thought was that he looked like him, but I thought "no, that's impossible - way too coincidental." After they had left, the people I was with turned to me and said, "Do you know who that was?" and I said, "Who?" "That was Mac from the Mac/PC commercials!"

Apparently people had been talking about it when he had gone in, too. I couldn't believe what had just happened, especially the fact that I could recognize him on TV and not in real life. A couple minutes later he passed in front of us going the opposite way, and this time when we made eye contact, he knew that I recognized him and he didn't look very pleased. I couldn't help it, though, I needed to validate it. I said loudly to him, "Hey, were you in Idiocracy?" He said yeah and moved along his way. He seemed at least relieved that I didn't mention the Mac commercials, but I could still tell he wasn't all that enthused to be recognized.

I didn't realize this at the time, but he had already starred in Accepted, which I haven't seen, but as soon as I heard that I could picture the ads for it and thought, "Oh yeah, that is him." Just the other night I saw a commercial for Live Free, Die Hard, the fourth Die Hard movie, and there he was. That's huge. He went from being the hip young Mac who couldn't understand the ridiculousness of the square old PC to being in a movie with Bruce Willis.

So who's going to get their half minute next? Who's going to fall through the cracks? Only time will tell.

Jack Black came up through commercials, and now he's a household name. I would never call any of the people I talked about here to be household names, but they're known by description, which is step one I suppose.