Peloton’s holiday commercial is a bad advertisement for a pricey robot bicycle that features a woman psychically enthralled to video selfies and her exercise routine. It’s also making stars out of its actors. On one hand, the Peloton Lady (Monica Ruiz) appears to be doing all right, having been cast in a commercial for Ryan Reynolds’ gin company that offers a welcome epilogue to her sad story. On the other, the Peloton Husband—an actor and teacher named Sean Hunter—can’t get people to leave him alone about the presumably shitty guy he plays for a few seconds in the spot.
In an interview with Good Morning America, Hunter discusses the “dark path” the ad has taken since its release and says he isn’t too fond of his “image … being associated with sexism, with the patriarchy, with abuse.”
“That’s not who I am,” he concludes.
Hunter also wrote a statement published in Psychology Today that sees him contrast the “extremely positive experience” of filming the ad with the “array of malicious feedback that is all associated with my face.”
“Unfortunately,” he writes, “the problem is that viewers can mistake an actor as that person after they’ve seen them on television instead of a person given a script with no opinion on what they are being told to portray.”
TMZ ran a video yesterday, too, where Hunter was asked if he’d seen the most recent Saturday Night Live, which featured a Weekend Update joke about the commercial. He had, and called it “frustrating” because it reinforces the idea that the ad blows—an opinion that viewers surely could not have come to on their own. Hunter also mentions getting mean Instagram DMs because of his part. While this situation probably hasn’t been helped a ton by Hunter having changed his handle to @pelotonhusband, please, for the love of god, just leave the Peloton Husband alone. It’s punishment enough that he’s in the advertisement in the first place.
[via Time]
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