You might recognize him as the guy in the white lab coat with the clipboard in the Cheez-It commercials. That’s him. Now residing in L.A., Joe Smith was born in New York, moved to Worcester when he was 2 and graduated from Doherty Memorial High School. He then attended Syracuse, where he studied theatre, film and writing. Since then, he has worked on countless commercials, plays, voice-overs, and various acting gigs. He just finished up filming some more Cheez-It commercials and is looking forward to continuing some personal projects.
What was your first acting gig? My first professional acting job of any sort was a local radio commercial for Maurice the Pant Man, which was a place that used to exist in Kelley Square. And that’s because people would call my dad for casting suggestions. They would think, ‘OK, a guy who works in a theater knows actors,’ and they would call him one project or another and they needed a couple of teenagers to do a radio sport for a back to school sale. And then I started doing theater mostly at Foothills Theatre the first couple of years, and was lucky to have the opportunity to perform there and work with some wonderful professionals and got to pick their brain.
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You do plays, commercials, voice-overs. What is your favorite to do? I really do like being able to do a lot of different things. That’s kind of what appeals to me about what I do. As unsteady and insecure as it can be, the flip side of it is you get to do a lot different type of things. That buffetstyle career really suits me. There’s no one thing that I’d say, ‘Oh if I could just do that, I’d give up all these other things.’ But there’s nothing like performing in front of a live audience. It’s what I did first and foremost doing theater. I love that dynamic of a live audience and having to modulate toward what they’re doing, and what they’re laughing at, if it’s an audience of 35 people, or 500 or 200 rowdy school kids, or 80 half-asleep senior citizens on a Wednesday afternoon. I really do love the dynamic of live theater. Since I’ve been in L.A., I don’t do as much live stuff. I’ve been having fun doing the Cheez-It commercials, and having that chance of doing really subtle improvisation, which you can do, because they allow a little room for it in the script and the nature of the campaign between the two characters.
How do you make a living as an actor? I guess just like any kind of freelancer you understand that when you’re making a lot of money, you can’t just spend like you’re always going to be making a lot of money, because there will be times when you’re making very little or none, and you have to be able to proportion it out and take that into account. It’s unsteady, this up and down lifestyle. I’ve been doing it exclusively for 21 years or something like that, so I’m knocking on wood right now. I’ve been very fortunate to say, ‘Hey, there are a lot of actors who are incredibly talented and have been doing it for years an still have to park cars on the weekend or be a paralegal.’ Not all of my work has been high glamorous stuff. I’ve done corporate trainings. I sometimes will peruse other people’s voice-over demos. That’s one of the things I do on the side because I have a little home studio. I record my own demos and my own audio projects from home. I’ve got about 15 years of audio editing experience now, so that’s something I do a little on the side, but mostly commercials and voiceovers have been my bread and butter. If the ideal is to do something you really or are passionate about for a living, then I feel I’ve got some Venn diagram overlap with that ideal. I do work that I enjoy, sometimes I love. I’m passionate about it. I’ll do plays that feed my soul, I’ll have so much joy doing and it pays $170 a week, and then you go in and do a tag line at the end of a McDonald’s commercial where you say, ‘That’s right, and the McGriddle is just 99 cents,’ and it’s fine. It doesn’t make you dance in the streets with joy, but that can hold you over for the time you’re getting paid peanuts for a play.
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What are some of the commercials you’ve worked on? The Cheez-It ones we’ve been doing for almost seven years … that’s been a nice consistent job that we’ve had a lot of fun with. We actually just shot some more in Chicago just last week before I was visiting Massachusetts. I did a campaign for the Boston Globe where I was a talking newspaper box, sort of a candid camera thing. I did one earlier this year for Verizon, Cars.com. Nothing quite as visible and recognizable as the CheezIt ones, I can send you links to some spots and I bet you’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that spot.’
What is one everyone would know, but not recognize you from? There was one a couple years ago they played a bunch … it was for GE … I was in my underwear with a room of doctors. That was the one for some reason a lot of people I went to high school with were like, ‘Hey, I saw you in your underwear on TV.’ I think the other one people tend to recognize visually, this was a few years ago, for Swiffer, I was a giant piece of dust; basically a costume as a piece of dust in a computer keyboard between the letters “J” and “K” and talking about being a lonely piece of dust in a computer keyboard, and a Swiffer comes along and I get swallowed up with the Swiffer. That’s one that necessarily didn’t look like me, but the the people that saw it were like, “That sounded like you!’
Is it weird to see yourself on TV? I actually don’t have cable services, I have streaming …but certainly when I’m at a friends house or a bar … you still end up seeing yourself one way or another … there’s never a point when I want to draw attention to it and be like, ‘Hey, everybody, I’m on TV!’ It can be embarrassing if my friends shout when I’m just trying to have a nice quiet dinner. It’s funny to be sitting below a TV with your face on it, in a dorky swooped over haircut, in a white lab coat.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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