The commercial US Cellular dropped last month runs only about 30 seconds. But it took the better part of a week to create – months, if you include the casting process – and has taken Jeremy Payne on quite a journey in the weeks since it debuted.
Payne, who lives in Mineral Point and works as a mental health service provider for Dane County, hadn’t done any acting since he was a kid acting out Bible stories at Jordan Baptist Church in Burbank, Illinois. But US Cellular was looking for real people, real US Cellular customers, to star in ads for its Us Days campaign.
One day last fall he got a call from a friend, whose mom happens to be a working actress in Los Angeles. She was wondering, his friend told him, whether he was still a US Cellular customer; he said he was, mostly because of the good coverage he gets in rural Iowa County.
Payne said sure, he was game … but didn’t really expect anything to come of it.
“At first I was dragging my feet with it,” Payne told Madison365. “Like seriously, what’s the percentage (chance) of me really breaking through and really having this happen?”
Still, he decided to give it his best shot, recording a video audition at his home.
“I really sold it up, dude,” he said with a laugh. “I went to my back porch… had that backdrop of rural Wisconsin. We happened to have horses in the pasture racing around… I told them, yeah, it’s middle of nowhere living for me… but this is real life.”
That audition got him through to the next stage, a live interview and audition with the producers via video call. He’d need a quiet place for that, but his day job with Dane County had him out and about on Madison’s South Side. He stopped by the Urban League, which was closed, so he popped into the library at the Madison College Goodman South Campus, where he sometimes stops to submit his clinical notes. There, a librarian bent the rules and let him use a private room without a reservation.
“I’m like, dude, I need this (room) to audition, or I’m gonna have to pull over and set up outside,” Payne recalled. The room was all windows, and the audition required more dancing. “People looking on probably thought I was going crazy,” Payne added.
That second audition apparently went well, too, because before he knew it, Payne was on a first-class flight to Austin, Texas.
Before he left, though, he had to cancel a hair appointment.
“My curly natural hair was the brand that they like,” he said. “I couldn’t even go to get cleaned up, lined up and shaped up with the beard and all of that. I couldn’t do it. They told me not touch it at all.”
His understanding was that he and a longtime US Cellular employee named Eric would give the pitch and then do a little freestyle dance.
Turned out not to be so freestyle.
“And then the day before I arrived, videos came through with full choreography,” Payne said. When he arrived on set, though, that choreography was simplified to accommodate Eric’s mobility challenges.
“As a former dancer, I offered feedback,” Payne said. “The final product you see is definitely a condensed version and modified, but nevertheless, I think they still hit what they wanted to do.”
Once the cameras started rolling, the biggest challenge was his natural and familial western Tennessee/South Side Chicago accent.
“They had to do so many takes literally for me just pronouncing ‘US Cellular,'” he said.
Payne noted that there were two other commercials filming at the same location, one featuring a Latino man and another featuring an Indigenous woman. And that wasn’t the only form of diversity the company accommodated.
“They accommodated for Eric’s abilities—they didn’t shut it down. That was huge,” Payne said. “There were a lot of women in leadership. This was my first time personally seeing so many women behind cameras as well. It was divine alignment.”
Payne, who is also founder of My Black Carrot LLC Mentoring Hub and a Social Emotional Learning Course instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had to keep the whole thing under wraps until the commercial dropped nationwide in late March. It’s been running in steady rotation both on television and streaming sites iike YouTube.
“I had like 15 to 20 young people come up to me and say, ‘Are you that guy from that commercial?’ and doing the routine and reciting the lines. I’m just like, wow,” he said.
The whole experience was a lot of fun but also widened Payne’s perspective.
“There’s a lot going on in the world, let’s be honest. Let’s be real,” he said. “There’s a lot of fires happening in many spaces and places. And so this was a cool way for me to get out into the world and be amongst real humans, beyond my small community.”
