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A word with Daved Wilkins, star of the million-dollar-winning Doritos Super Bowl commercial, “Time Machine”

This is the face of a guy who starred in a million-dollar-winning Super Bowl ad that he and his friends made for Doritos on a $300 budget and the premise that a cardboard box could become a Doritos Time Machine.

This is Daved Wilkins.

daved-doritos

Wilkins is the face of the ad, but the pitch in the Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” user-submitted TV commercial contest was a team effort, with filmmaker Ryan Thomas Andersen and mutual friend Raj Suri, who co-wrote the script together. Andersen and Suri live in Phoenix; Wilkins used to live in the Valley of the Sun (he’s an ASU grad) but moved to Tucson, and then four years ago, to Los Angeles.

Wilkins told The Comic’s Comic: “Ryan, Raj and I are splitting the $1 Million along with our crew (sound guy, the old man, the kid, a grip/jack-of-all-things-on-set, and Ryan’s mom[it was her house we shot at]).”

Wilkins explains his own background, which includes friendships with stand-up comedians, training at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and work with some larger comedy-based YouTube channels:

I am one of those guys that gets told by practically everyone that I should do stand-up. I respect stand-up comics. It’s the most terrifying way to be an entertainer in my opinion. I have performed stand-up comedy 3 times in my life. The first 2 times I was 18. One went well, the other was the definition of bombing on stage. Fast-forward 15 years and I’m at the Ice House in Pasadena to see my friend Brooks McBeth headline a set and comes up to me and asks if I’ll do 5 minutes because a friend cancelled. I say yes (what was I thinking), get up and talk (what was I doing) and sit back down (what did I just do)… I got a few laughs but mostly it was a blur. It reminded me that it takes a very strong and confident person to undergo that kid of torture on a daily basis and maybe I should stick to sketch and improv or my many stand-up for groups of 2-6 people that everyone else calls having a conversation. I’ve trained at UCB in LA and do a lot of work with some larger YouTube channels.
 
I met Ryan through our mutual friend Raj Suri who also co-wrote the script with Ryan and me. We were Facebook friends and would use each other as sounding boards for current projects and future endeavors. We met in person for the first time when I drove out to Phoenix to shoot our Doritos commercial. The idea was Ryan’s and it was brilliant. My contribution came in form of taking a funny idea and making it a commercial for a product. I got to use my Marketing degree from ASU (maybe for the first time) along with the 3 years of experience reading and auditioning for commercial copy in LA to help create something we were all excited about and knew had the stuff to win the contest. I didn’t accept any payment because I believed in the idea and I am the kind of guy who will split a million dollars that may never come over taking a few bucks now. I just knew we had a great concept and I knew Ryan was a talented film maker. It was destined to be. I just saw Frank Luntz named our spot the 2nd best ad in the Super Bowl this year so we clearly did something right. There were a lot of funny videos but ours appealed evenly to men and women which Luntz says is “…very difficult to do in a Super Bowl ad or any ad..” and that with our ad “… you knew it was for Doritos but you didn’t feel put upon by it…”
 
The next step for us is to continue to partner to create more projects. We have some concepts for some feature films and a few other advertisements so I’m hoping we will be pretty busy for the next few years.

Congrats, guys.

Roll the clip!

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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