Here I live the fantasy of movie critics everywhere by shooting Charlie Sheen, seen here as he flees the White House in Shadow Conspiracy. I'm thinking, "This one's for Navy Seals; that's for Men at Work; that's for The Arrival." My first lines in a movie: "Pull back! Grab him!" I guess my character can't make up his mind.
My father and Alfred Heineken, the founder's grandson, attended grade school together in Amsterdam in the late 1920s. My father used to let little Alfie copy his answers during math tests. Eighty years later I got some karmic payback by booking a couple of hand commercials for the brand. Presenting... "Snakes, I mean, Heineken on a Plane."
... and the ever popular "Heineken in a Grocery Store."
The good people from Golden, Colorado were kind enough to use my metacarpus in a series of six commercials for the "Silver Bullet." In this spot, I'm the hand slamming the bottle into the ice bucket at the end, which was actually a bucket of plastic chips sprayed with glycerin. Now that's thirst-quenching!
It's torturous to open frosty cans of beer all day long and not be able to drink one.
Grab that beer bottle? Sure... for the modest fee of $2,000. What a racket this hand modeling is.
The old blindfold test -- a classic commercial set-up. Now if you're anything like me you're probably saying to yourself, "Hey, self... if Folgers Coffee is a company founded by James Folger in San Francisco in 1860, then where the hell is the apostrophe in Folgers?"
Answer: Proctor & Gamble dropped the apostrophe when they bought the company in 1963, thus doing their part to make our country just a little bit dumber.
In this Honeycomb spot I had to fling the box fifty feet down a football field into a tarp held by two production assistants. Interestingly, they didn't use a real box of Honeycombs, but rather a slightly oversized wooden box painted to look like a cereal box. Ah, the mysteries of the prop department.
Blink and you'll miss me in this spot for the 2007 Mitsubishi Outlander.
It took me eleven tries to land that "NO!" stamp smack dab in the middle of the box. By the eighth try, you can tell the grips are thinking, Jesus Christ on a Krispy Kreme donut, let me do it so we can get out of here before midnight.
The trickiest part of this was getting the mustard swirl just right. Mustard doesn't always do what you want it to.
At the end of this spot you'll notice the latest version of the Wienermobile. It has a horn that plays the Oscar Mayer Wiener jingle in 21 musical genres from rap to Cajun to Bossa Nova. Now that's rad.
Four hand models in one commercial.
Mine is the sassy hand coming in from the top left during the toast.
The moral of this story: Use the American Express card or be subjected to body cavity searches at airports.
And to think my third grade teacher said making paper airplanes in class was a waste of time. Bet she's sorry now. Actually, I bet she's dead now.
Here I get to be Ashton Kutcher's thumb double. Can you believe such things exist?
Since the iPhone came along, half the spots I audition for involve some sort of touchscreen concept.
I didn't realize I was a part of this commercial until I saw it on TV. I did a print ad for Jack in the Box, featuring my hand thrusting out the Jack Cash card. A year later a poster featuring my hand holding the Jack Cash card was used in this commercial. As a result, I got paid for "appearing" in this commercial. A technicality, but I'll take it.
Here's one of a series of four spots I did for Miller Lite. Mine is the unseen hand topping off the beer at the end. It's more fun to actually appear in the commercial, but the pay for hand models is the same either way.
The trick here was to get the bottom of the beer head to just barely kiss the top of the blue swirl. And my pour had to impart that slight center indent in the top of the head. Et voilà!
Here's a video of me pounding a bung hole. What? That stopper I'm hammering into the barrel is called a "bung."
I've never been on The Tonight Show, but my hands have. That's me holding the mirror.
Hand doubles are used to keep actors happy by not forcing them to act in every one of their scenes. Here's an example from ABC's Blind Justice, starring Ron Eldard.
And here's me hand-doubling Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own. That's Brad swinging the firewood, of course, but me yanking it off the woodpile. I did other kooky hand bits in this film, like zipping a duffel bag, cocking a gun, and grabbing a sandwich.
Okay, this isn't a clip of me. But it's the funniest bit here. It's my wife on the Adam Carolla radio show. She was there to give Adam's sidekick, Oswaldo, some vocal coaching, but the task of naming my then unborn son was a subject everyone had an opinion about. The kid's lucky. He could have been named Luthor Altes, Motive Altes, Sepulveda Altes, or even John Horse Altes.
It was always a blast to work on The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin is a genius. Would it have killed you to watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, America?
