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Sing it, FreeCreditReport.com guy!
Baby-faced Everyman is played with heartbreaking adorability by French Canadian actor Eric Violette — who is also a skilled singer and musician. So while the 27-year-old isn’t faking the guitar he’s playing on camera, he certainly doesn’t sound like that.
Now that you know that, check him out. Violette looks totally different, right? Suddenly he’s Hot Foreign Guy, right? (And ladies, he's single!) Meanwhile, upon gaining this information, a co-worker claimed he could see Eric lip syncing with a French accent, which is totally not true. The guy — and the commercials — are just that good.
In a recent road trip down the East Coast of the United States, Violette learned just how effective his acting is. “People wanted to take pictures with me,” he says in a telephone interview from his home just outside Montreal — where nobody recognizes him except his friends and family. (The commercials don’t air in Canada.) “It’s very strange but very funny. When some people recognized me, they’d have a big smile on their face.”
Violette says all this with a dreamy French accent, which is why he isn’t the guy singing in the commercial. This is a story about an American slacker’s woes, a guy who Violette assures us he’s nothing like — his credit score is pretty good. Though, he adds, credit scores don’t carry the frightening weight in Canada like they do here in the good old U.S. of A.
Still, he can relate to the stories. “Nobody wants a woman who doesn’t have good credit,” Violette says, making a joke about the first, perhaps most controversial commercial in the series, “Dreamgirl.” (Is bad credit the new “fat?")
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FreeCreditReport.com Who didn't see this coming? Still, we must admit the upcoming episode, which we've seen and you haven't, is totally our favorite song and scenario for this troika of dispair. |
“We don’t know the whole story,” is my defense against the majority who find the guy’s actions indefensible.
“It’s like in real life,” says Violette.
Actually, jingle writer Dave Mulhefeld admits that first commercial is somewhat autobiographical. What’s more, he did work in a fish restaurant and drive a used subcompact — though a nicer one than the blue beater featured in the commercial. Mulhefeld says the next set of FreeCreditReport.com commercials are inspired more from YouTube comments than his past.
“We looked for currents of things that fans really really liked and were talking about and we used that to inform the new spots,” he says. After the latest “Bicycle” commercial, in which our guy is forced to trade in his used subcompact for a fixed-gear bike, you’ll find him and the rest of the band rocking the Renaissance Faire (our hands-down favorite) and then working as cater waiters at a rock-star party that sadly, isn’t theirs.
As the campaign moves further into the theater of the absurd, you can expect to find the pirate hat and the cranky old lady, viewer “Easter eggs” featured in every episode. Don’t expect things to look up for this troika of despair, however.
“I don’t see our singer learning his lesson anytime soon,” Mulhefeld says.
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