Did the GEICO “caveman” – a popular character in the insurer’s ad campaigns – go extinct?
It turns out, the actor behind the caveman character is now an English professor at the University of Southern Indiana.
The Evansville Courier & Press reached out to and interviewed McManus Woodend, who played the character from 2009 to 2018. Woodend, who is currently working on his PhD in literacy and musical and visual thought, quipped that some of his friends did not initially believe that he was the caveman, until he showed them visual proof of the prosthetics used to transform his facial features into the Neanderthal-like character. He said that the prosthetics took three hours and an hour to put on, and an hour and a half to take off.
Woodend said it felt like he could get away with anything while he was in costume and full prosthetics.
“Then I was just like everyone else and that was for the better,” he told Evansville Courier & Press.
While he appeared in six feature films, Woodend’s portrayal as the caveman is his most famous role. He explained that he landed the role after beating out about 1,000 other actors who auditioned for the role. At that time, Woodend was working at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida as a film industry outreach liaison.
Woodend’s first portrayal of the caveman character was part of a campaign tie-in between GEICO and Discovery Channel’s reality show, Deadliest Catch. According to him, he traveled to Homer, Alaska for the shoot. What was supposed to be a one-week shoot felt like two months, Woodend commented, when the crew had to deal with a blizzard and an avalanche.
It was during the D.C. Food and Wine Festival that Woodend as the caveman made his first public appearance in character. Recounting the experience, he said that had the opportunity to speak with cooking personality Paula Deen at the festival, who told him he was “so lucky” that he gets to put on makeup and “everybody loves [him]” and take it off without issue, while she “[doesn’t] get to take off [her] makeup.”
Woodend would play the caveman character until the 2018 Winter Olympics at Pyeongchang, South Korea, where the character last appeared. He is now a teacher and believes that he is taking after his parents, who have been teachers for 30 to 40 years.
"It's definitely in my blood," he said. "I have a lot of friends in the teaching profession."
