As A-Listers Rush Into TV Ads, the Middle-Class Actor Economy Collapses

Stars Steal the National Ad Spotlight

It’s convenient to blame celebrities for the plight of the commercial actor. There was a time when you’d happen upon a bootlegged video of George Clooney in a Nespresso commercial from Japan and snicker — now Aquaman’s Jason Momoa and Jurassic World’s Chris Pratt happily star in ads for mobile video games like Monopoly Go!, taking jobs that used to be filled by the non-famous.

Nothing is beneath the A-lister now. You’ll always have spokespeople like Jennifer Garner and Samuel L. Jackson for megabrands like Capital One, but further down the totem pole are mobile games like Royal Kingdom, which alone has recruited Jimmy Fallon, Kaley Cuoco, LeBron James, and at least two Friends (Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow) to shill for it.

This means the workaday performers who become household names through commercials — think Stephanie Courtney, aka Flo from Progressive — are fewer and further between.

“It’s a recession indicator,” says Haun semi-facetiously of the dwindling opportunities. “Like, I think about it all the time. The best payday from commercials that I had was basically working as a spokesperson for Xfinity, and now it’s Heidi Gardner and Dan Levy in the Homes.com spots. Obviously, they’re very talented comedians, but I think that it’s just trickling down — that celebrities are not making as much money as they used to, and they’re turning to commercials to make up for some of that income, which then trickles down to the actors who do a lot of commercials.” In recent years Haun has booked national commercials for Wayfair (as a secondary player to star Titus Burgess) and Homes.com but also supplements her income by teaching acting classes.

Ellen Haun’s national Discover Card commercial👇🏼

The Gardner- and Levy-starring spot was made for the Super Bowl, where advertisers pull out all the stops, and even the biggest stars are often happy to swan in for their 30 seconds… but the point stands as the Homes.com campaign continued with many more ads featuring the two comic actors (plus Jeff Goldblum, plus Morgan Freeman…) throughout the year. And the Super Bowl is no longer the exception. “As we all know, the movie and TV business has changed dramatically,” one major commercial voiceover agent tells me. “It’s always been a great way to supplement income,” this person adds, and more actors at every level need that supplement now. “It has become more important as things have changed in the rest of the entertainment industry.”

Still, what’s impacting the commercial landscape even more than Fallon’s need to make a quick buck is the way advertising dollars are spent.

“There’s so much more money spent in digital and in social where there’s just not the need, or really the ability, to put a voice on those spots” at all, says the agent. “A lot of them are very short spots. It used to be that it was the 30- and 60-second commercial, and you had these great voices providing VO services for these campaigns, and they were associated as the voice of the brand. You’ve now got very short, small spots that run before a YouTube commercial, or whatever it might be.” And yes, those spots don’t require famous (or even, non-famous) voices.

And then there’s the brave new world of AI-generated TV commercials, an often reviled genre that has brought us the controversial ad campaigns from Coca-Cola, which is, for the second year in a row, rolling out an AI-fueled holiday ad with expressive dogs, squirrels and seals, and no humans in sight, minus Santa on a billboard.

A second commercial VO agent I spoke to isn’t particularly worried about AI usurping roles from her clients — at least for now, given the guardrails that SAG-AFTRA incorporated into its contract after the 2023 strike. But as celebrities become more open to creating digital replicas of their likenesses, who’s to say how the impact will trickle down to the middle-class performer. Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine both recently inked a pact with AI company ElevenLabs to create AI versions of their iconic voices. If McConaughey can start doing double duty by shooting a movie while his voice is used in another Lincoln car commercial, will that mean less need for other actors?

‘Used to Be This Godsend’

Haun, a veteran of the New York theater world and Upright Citizens Brigade, says that even when she was having a good year, earning about $80,000 from one or two national commercials, she always had a part-time job working in an office. During the boom years pre-pandemic, she’d go out on maybe two auditions a week. Now she’s auditioning a couple of times a month.

She writes and coaches actors as well as teaches classes. Half her clientele comes from word of mouth. The other half comes from flyers she has papered around Los Angeles. The Homes.com national commercial has earned her around $50,000 in all, including most of the $22,000 in commercial residuals she’s gotten this year, but when she tallies up her earnings in 2025, more of her income has come from teaching than acting.

Danny Farber, a 30-year-old actor and director who got his start in Chicago, booked his first and second national commercials in L.A. in the same week in 2022 — one for Home Depot and the other for Chase — which in the acting world is like winning the lottery.

“I was on every Chase ATM in America for 14 weeks,” he tells me of the campaign that covered TV, social and print media. He earned more than $45,000 from both national commercials combined (like Haun, he also has a number of TV and film roles on his IMDb). It couldn’t have come at a better time, since it was while he was on set for one of the spots that he got let go from his job at Mandy.com, a professional network for actors and crew members, after the company had been acquired by Backstage.

In the fall of 2023, Farber began directing microdramas, aka vertical dramas, the booming market my colleague Natalie Jarvey and I have been covering this year, which is now also finding backers in major studios like Disney. He was quickly signed to a 12-picture deal with the app GoodShort and has directed several vertical dramas in Los Angeles, Vancouver and Istanbul. When he booked a national Subway commercial a year ago, he was able to slot it in between filming vertical projects, the “perfect storm” of juggling auditions for commercials amid directing verticals — or so he thought.

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This past summer, Farber auditioned for an unnamed commercial for casting director Ross Lacy at 200 South, a well-known casting facility in L.A., shortly before jetting off to Istanbul for pre-production on a new vertical drama.

Then he got the call that he’d booked the gig. “Guys, I’m physically 5,000 miles away,” he told his agents. “I have a crew of over 100 people for these two projects that are looking at me to be the project leader here. I can’t.”

For our video chat this past Friday, Farber Zooms in from his first London-based vertical drama. Does he regret letting go of a national commercial for an entertainment format that some people in legacy Hollywood still have trouble taking seriously?

“Commercial acting used to be this godsend, where it would sporadically come in and change the course of my financial floundering or succeeding,” Farber says. “This new revenue source has come in in the form of verticals, and I’d much rather keep a good relationship with the commitments I’ve made on the vertical directing side of the world [even if I] potentially harm existing relationships over at really reputable casting directors’ offices.”

Besides, even when you finally hit the jackpot and book that national commercial, it’s no guarantee of financial success. The Subway commercial Farber booked in 2024? It never aired. He was paid his session fee for the shoot, and a little more when the sandwich chain extended its contract on the campaign for a bit, but that was it. All told, he earned only $2,400 from Subway, a far cry from the $45,000 he’d put away from Home Depot and Chase. That went a long way into taking out the sting of the “what if” from the national commercial he left on the table.

“I genuinely feel bad about having to turn it down,” says Farber, “but it was almost a no-brainer.”