Jeremy Strong Says Ben Affleck’s Viral Dunkin’ Donuts Ad Was the Closest He’ll Get to Hosting ‘SNL’
Jeremy Strong has no desire to host “Saturday Night Live” — but not because he takes himself too seriously, he says. Stop rolling your eyes and watch his viral, self-deprecating Dunkin’ Donuts Super Bowl ad.
The short film, which was directed by Ben Affleck, features Strong having an “Apocalypse Now”-esque moment with coffee grinds and trying to “get into character” in his trailer.
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“I wanted to poke fun at this idea of me as this sententious, self-serious actor,” Strong told Variety. “It was my response to the idea that I ‘don’t get the joke.'”
He added, “I’ve never wanted to host ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I’m someone who needs a certain degree of control in order to be free, and I need to do a lot of preparation. But this felt like a chance, in a way, to do a single ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch, just one that I could prepare for and do on my own terms.”
And while Strong has turned down Super Bowl ads before — and even tweaked director Affleck’s original concept for this spot — he felt that this particular opportunity was one to have more “freedom” with.
“You have to be willing to make a giant fucking fool of yourself,” Strong said. “You have to go way out on that limb. […] I’ve been asked to do Super Bowl commercials before, but it didn’t feel genuinely creative or funny. It felt transactional and like you were just selling a product, which is fine, but not something I wanted to do. But then Ben sent me the script, which had Ben and Casey in tracksuits. At the end of it, I came out in a tracksuit and did a rap like I had done on ‘Succession.’ I said no. I wasn’t interested in rehashing something I’d done before. I want to put distance between myself and that show and achieve escape velocity.”
Strong continued, “It’s Ben Affleck. He’s a great director and actor. He’s somebody I greatly admire. And so I thought about it and texted Ben saying ‘I’ve never done anything like this before. This feels unnatural to me, but is there any latitude to create something? Is there any freedom here?’ My pitch to Ben was highbrow, lowbrow. I spent days just marinating, and came up with a bunch of ideas, which led to other ideas. I approached this the way I approach anything. So the macro of it is I thought there was a way to play it straight, which was that I’m this actor who takes what he’s doing very seriously, and I don’t want to rap in this commercial. So when they get to that point in the shoot, I’m not on set, and the PA says I won’t come out of my trailer and Ben comes to find me, and I don’t want to do the rap because I’m not feeling it. From there it tessellated into all these other ideas. I had this image of Marty Sheen from ‘Apocalypse Now’ coming out of the mud. And first I thought I’d be steeped in tea, because that seemed highbrow, and then that became coffee.”
He added, “I wanted to find a way to say that you can take your work incredibly seriously while not taking yourself all that seriously. At the same time, I’m a big believer in risking something every time you do a piece of work. This was its own form of risk, because it’s the Super Bowl. This is not my native element. This just felt like a limb to go out on with incredible collaborators on a big canvas. And I thought, if Ben’s going to let me do this on my own terms and improvise all of it, that’s a chance worth taking.”
The Method acting bit in particular was Strong’s idea.
“I had no trouble taking the piss out of myself,” he said. “I’ve been accused of being this incredibly self-serious, pretentious person. And I do take my work extremely seriously. If you give me a piece of material, I won’t let anything stand between me and what I think I need to do to serve it. But I thought it’d be good to have a laugh at this idea of being a method actor, because I’ve never called myself a method actor, and I’m not a method actor. It’s all about imagination and commitment. And every time you do anything, you’re sort of finding your way in the dark and trying to have courage to stick with it.”
Strong, too, is over the debates of his approach to roles.
“I’m tired of it. It doesn’t really serve anything. It’s false,” the Oscar-nominated “The Apprentice” actor said. “We live in this age where there’s so much attention on all the other stuff that’s not the work, and we’ve become sort of conditioned now to talking about the work so much. It really takes away from it. We’d all be better off going back to a time where actors were able to disappear into their work, and they were more absences than presences. They’re present in the work and absent outside of that.”
And Strong already has an idea for another Dunkin’ Donuts ad, this time with fellow Roy Cohn-portrayer Al Pacino.
“Pacino and I both played Roy Cohn. And [Al] Pacino did an amazing fake Dunkaccino commercial [in ‘Jack and Jill’], and I did a real one. I’m going to try to get him to team up with me and maybe we can do another Dunkin’ Donuts commercial next year,” he said.
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