We don’t do a lot of people who have their own Urban Dictionary pages, but there is Orlando Jones, in one of the places from which any number of us are always going to remember him. I usually feel slightly guilty when I remember people best from commercials, especially if they’ve done other high-quality work elsewhere. Therefore, it came as quite the relief to discover that Jones did some of his own writing for the commercials. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better. Besides, they were delightful commercials that were more creative than a lot of others that I remember at least as well.
Jones seems an interesting figure overall. His website, which hasn’t been updated since 2017, talks about academic papers he’s involved in, which is not bad for a college dropout. He broke into the industry via advertising—but not in front of the camera. He actually had a production studio, Homeboy’s Productions and Advertising, with fellow comedian Michael Fechter. From there, he began to work as a sitcom writer before moving to MadTV, where he would both write and appear in front of the camera.
Apparently he felt a bit too good for 7-Up. He’d been in movies already, and of course there was the sitcom writing. Still, he was given the opportunity to help create the character himself, and the commercials had an irreverent sense of humour that you wouldn’t expect from That Soda You Get When You’re Sick. I won’t say they were trying to make 7-Up sexy, because that just wouldn’t be happening, but they were associating it with considerably more adult jokes than you would expect, and you could buy a shirt for years at Spencers Gifts that Jones wore in one of the spots, one that had “Make 7” on the front and “Up Yours” on the back.
He has a small but memorable role as the guy who doesn’t know how to launder money in Office Space, a movie I didn’t see until well after the commercials went off the air but which made me say, “Oh, hey, it’s that guy!” He’s not bad in the unfairly forgotten 2000 Bedazzled, which I hope will get a reevaluation now we’re all talking about Brendan Fraser. Similarly, I am the only person who unironically quite likes Evolution, wherein he plays a geologist who’s friends with David Duchovny’s disgraced biologist character. I found their chemistry utterly believable, and if the movie isn’t the most intellectual thing going, it’s still worth watching.
If you want Really Amazing from him, of course there’s Mr. Nancy. When I found out how they were treating the character, and by extension Jones himself, in season two, it made me lose all interest. In fact, I still haven’t seen it. Jones is a little young for the role as I picture the character—he’s about six and a half years older than I am, and Mr. Nancy needs to look somewhere in his mid-sixties—but he was still outstanding at it. Maybe we’ll get him in a production of Anansi Boys at some point when he’s actually old enough for it, though goodness knows there’s not a lot of Mr. Nancy in that book outside of flashback. It’s still a role at which he excels.
