If you lived through them, you know: the 90s were a different time. Puka shell necklaces were hot, candy was marketed as a snack, and child-acting contracts were lax. I fell victim to all of these phenomena, and I’m still paying the price. You might already know where I’m going with this, and indeed it’s true — they turned my head into a lime for a 90s Gushers commercial and never changed it back.
It turns out that I’m the only one, for some reason.
When I booked as Gushers Snacking Mall Tween some 23 years ago, I thought I would get a solid paycheck, some industry cred, and at least as many free Gushers as I could eat during the shoot. But what I walked away with was much more than I bargained for. When they made my head blow up into a huge, grotesque lime with a face as part of a campaign, I thought, “It’s a little extreme, but this guy has a banana head, so how bad could it be?”
But when they wrapped the shoot and everyone went home and I was left standing there all alone with my unwieldy and terrible lime head, nobody was around to tell me what would happen or when my green, bulbous head would go back to normal.
I didn’t even get free Gushers, or medical attention. Now my head is just like this.
Since then, the world has moved on around me with commercials for children’s food containing substantially less body horror, but I remain having to exclusively wear button-downs because no neck is big enough to pull over my enormous, lime-shaped head.
You never worry about this sort of thing until it happens to you, so let this be a warning: If you ever get cast in a national commercial, read the fine print! Getting pigeonholed as a Lime for the rest of my acting career forced me out of the biz altogether and now I’m a doctor which sucks.
So be careful, and if there are any others out there who had their heads turned into large pieces of fruit in the 90s, please do not contact me. My lime head draws enough attention already; I don’t need to be rolling around with a whole crew.
