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20You're Just Not Dan Cortese Enough!

Having been blessed enough to work in the industry I love for over 25 years, I've come to learn many things about it. One of them being the fact that people in the entertainment industry are constantly being encouraged to reinvent themselves. I understand the reasoning behind this concept but also find the need for people to be very careful when attempting to do so. Because the truth is, the more people try to “reinvent” themselves, the greater the risk becomes of getting further away from who they really are. This problem can become an even more compounded issue when you're not sure who you really are to begin with.

I remember getting a call from my manager one day about a “slam dunk” commercial opportunity. Apparently, Gatorade was rolling out a new ad campaign, and the description for the attitude and voice of the commercials, read as follows: “The voice prototype for this campaign is Dan Cortese or a Dan Cortese–type.” Well hello, with that my manager opened his Motorola flip phone, placed a call to the casting people in charge of the campaign and let them know that not only could they get a “Dan Cortese–type,” they could get Dan Cortese. The only thing that closed quicker than his flip phone was the deal. All I had to do was go in for a voiceover session and just be me.

The script was pretty straightforward and so was the direction I was given by the producer. “Bring a lot of energy to it, but bring even more Dan, because that's what ...