Oscar campaigns hit the Super Bowl for Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, James Mangold
The Philadelphia Eagles crushed the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, but among this year’s Oscar nominees there was one clear winner: Jeremy Strong. The Apprentice star and Best Supporting Actor nominee appeared in a new commercial for Dunkin’ alongside Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck.
“I’d been approached a year ago to do something else for the Super Bowl with my siblings from Succession, for a brand that I didn’t really have a connection to. That categorically was a no for me. I’ve been interested in achieving escape velocity from Succession, which was an incredible life experience, but not something I wish to stay connected to forever,” Strong told Vanity Fair in an interview published Sunday night. “Then I got a call saying that Ben Affleck was doing this Dunkin’ commercial, and would I consider doing it?”
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In the initial pitch, it was requested that Strong perform a rap for Dunkin’ in the same way his Succession character Kendall Roy performed a hip-hop tribute to his father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), in Season 3 of Succession. Strong had little interest in the idea, but instead chose to mock the public perception of his persona as a Method actor.
“Ultimately, the real reason I did it, as you can probably surmise, was to do a parody of myself — to really try to once and for all answer the accusation that I don’t get the joke, and have a bit of a laugh and put my kids through college. Take a piss at myself,” Strong said in the interview, while also acknowledging that he took his performance as himself very seriously — even reasearching Revolutionary War music and colonial men to the point of obsession. “But it simultaneously functioned as like — I’ve never called myself a Method actor. I’m not a Method actor. I’m someone who believes in whatever it takes, and I’m a committed actor, but so are most actors.”
In the commercial, which first ran during the Grammy Awards earlier this month and appears online as a seven-minute short film, Strong is shown studying “The Bean Method,” which includes the actor actually submerging himself in a 55-gallon drum of coffee beans. “This idea of ‘The Bean Method,’ that’s as good a method as any other method. It’s no less ridiculous than the idea of being what the media has decided about me,” he told Vanity Fair.
The spot and its related materials have hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube already – not bad for visibility with Oscar voting starting on Tuesday. But Strong wasn’t the only 2025 Oscar nominee to participate in the Super Bowl marketing bonanza. His former Succession brother and fellow Best Supporting Actor nominee Kieran Culkin voiced a Beluga whale in a commercial for NerdWallet. The spot was one of the 10 most-watched out of the Super Bowl, according to Variety, well ahead of Strong and Ben Affleck’s Dunkin’ opus. (Of course, the NerdWallet spot debuted last week, giving it plenty of time to acrue views.)
A Complete Unknown filmmaker James Mangold — a three-time nominee as producer, director and co-writer of the Bob Dylan film — also factored into Sunday’s Super Bowl. Mangold directed his former Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny star Harrison Ford in a commercial for Jeep that featured Ford extolling the virtues of American individualism and pushing a message of having respect for others despite conflicting views.
“I said ‘yes’ to doing this commercial because of the script. It’s a very straightforward communication about life, and ends with getting in a Jeep vehicle, that’s the hook,” Ford said in a statement.. “It didn’t require me to reintroduce myself, point to the fact that in my life I’ve been many things, and known for specific projects or roles. It’s just a quiet talk from somebody sharing an idea. I love the way it developed.”
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