That Belly on Your Telly Belongs to This Guy!

The scene at a screenwriters’ “boot camp” in Chelsea was not funny. Around 40 or so people had coughed up $400 for four days of seminars, culminating in a final pitch session Sunday afternoon. The room was packed and had the dank air of an AA meeting. Instead of telling gruesome, true-life stories of battles with the bottle, each person got up and tried to sell the crowd on the sheaf of romantic comedy—a wedding photographer gets amnesia!—or action—Die Hard meets Memento!—he or she had been perfecting. The writers, whose median age appeared to be late 30s, introduced themselves first: waiter, bartender, PA, grip, Off Off Broadway theater producer. 

Then a fat guy wearing black and a thatch of hair plugs strode to the front of the room. He said he was a working actor and an accomplished screenwriter. Yeah, right. 

With a smile he held up a pamphlet from the “Bodies” exhibit at the South Street Seaport. 

“What if one of these bodies,” he asked, “was to come alive?” 

His pitch for his horror-comedy script—Cadaver—got laughs. Even the judge, Larry Meistrich—he produced Sling Blade and tells it like it is—said it was an excellent pitch. He ended up optioning it.

For the past 15 years or so, Steven Arvanites, 37, of Staten Island, has made his living as an actor—a commercial actor, competing for the “chubby funny guy” roles that are so common in television advertisements. His big break was playing the telephone repair guy who gets hungry in a Snickers commercial in 1999. 

“It’s not about acting; it’s just about an impression,” he said. “It’s 30 seconds, and you’re never the star. It’s the product: It’s the cup of coffee. Which is fine. And I got Off Broadway a few years back, in a funny, bad comedy and that was a good experience.”

He’s also had cameos on Law & Order episodes as the fat cop or construction worker.

So far he’s done around 30 commercials. You might have seen his chubby cheeks and sparkling white grin—he prides himself on having very clean teeth—in ads for Oxy Deep Carpet Cleaner, Toyota or Netflix. 

Earlier this year he did a bit in a Foxwoods Resort Casino commercial. That was probably the worst so far. The theme was The Wizard of Oz; he looked ridiculous as the Cowardly Lion.

“You have to separate yourself from the work—you’re a product with a belly,” he said. “And if it gets me work, as it has—well, God bless it. I love my belly.”  

Mr. Arvanites is not the only actor in this town who loves his own belly. His competition is a core group of about 10 tubby commercial actors. “There’s about a baker’s dozen—Danny, Balthazar, Terry, Mike, Bob, Joe … Freddy’s in there a lot. They’re all just bellies to me.” 

Danny, he noted, tends to do best. “He’s got this big solid thing going. He does a lot of rabid football guy commercials. He’s got the sort of fratty, unshaven look. Hungry-Man, Doritos, that kind of stuff.” 

Mr. Arvanites is somewhere in the middle. He averages around $85,000 a year. You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing, he likes to say. And he’s never given up on his dream to be a filmmaker. And after the attacks of 9/11, he kicked it into high gear. His father, Teddy, had been a mailman; his route was Tower One, floors 92 to 101. He died of a heart attack in 1998.

“So I’m glad we lost him to a heart attack instead of that tragedy,” said Mr. Arvanites. “That would have been just horrific. And I’m glad in some way that he went before those towers, because that was his home for 20 years, every day. Those elevators, those towers.”

His father had come over from Greece at 16 not speaking a word of English. Worked three jobs, went to the military, a success story. When Steven was in high school, his father got him messenger jobs at the Twin Towers for $4 a day, delivering messages from one firm to another. “He used to sneak me sandwiches from Windows on the World,” he said. “Everybody liked him because he was so gregarious. So besides the horrible human tragedy, I mourn the loss of those buildings, too, because we had such close ties. That was his route, Teddy the mailman.” Next Page >