Is that Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya - Princess Bride) in the Crestor cholesterol drug ads?
I think it’s him.
“My name is Inigo Montoya. You raise my cholesterol. Prepare to die.”
Oh gosh, how I miss Dead Like Me. 
Patrick Stewart is the narrator, that’s all I know (if they’re still using the Dr. Seuss-like narratives in their ads). And Antonio Banderas is the Nasonex bee.
No way! Really?
According to imdb, it is him. Here is a link.
Well, in voice-overs, Earl Hindman (Home Improvement) was the voice for Home Depot before he died, and Gene Hackman is the voice for Lowe’s.
Oh, I should mention my post is reffering to the OP.
IM: “I will take these pills left handed”
Dr. Vesinni: “You know what a hurry we’re in!”
IM: “Well, it is the only way I can be satisfied! If I eat them with my right…lowered to quickly.”
I’ll never forget him as Inigo Montoya, but Mandy Pankin’s most recent TV presence was in Dead Like Me, in which he played Rube, the supervisor of a team of Grim Reapers.
The first time my husband and I saw Mandy hawking Crestor, hubby muttered “And if I don’t take Crestor, what then? You’ll reap me?”
This thread has me wondering about a broader question. Seems as though a big trend lately has been to have celebrities do voice work for commercials. No picture of the celebrity. No “Hi, I’m David Spade for Celebrex”. Just a relatively-anonymous voiceover.
I think this goes right past most people. My wife is amazing at picking out celebrity voices, so she points them out to me. A lot of the time, I’ve seen the ad and never noticed that, say, Mark McGrath is the voice of the Pepsi bottle (or whatever).
It makes sense if it’s a really noticable voiec, like Sean Connery or Patrick Stewart, but what if it’s just a fairly bland actor like Alec Baldwin? Why are they paying the kind of fees that he must command for a totally anonymous voiceover that many viewers won’t even recognize? I don’t get it.
Hunh. This question came up once before and I got pointed to imdb.com and found that Joaquim de Almeida was the voice of the Nasonex bee… but that information is no longer listed under de Almeida, and IS listed under Antonio Banderas!
My source is the most recent issue of TV Guide.
Actually, I don’t think Alec Baldwin is considered to have a bland voice. It’s slightly gravely and pretty memorable. They wouldn’t be wasting money if they thought otherwise. But with a lot of things involving advertising, its likely difficult to gauge whether his use is effective or not.
Mandy is also the voice of Procrid. I was surprised that my mother didn’t recognize his voice.
In this Internet age, all they need is for one person to recognize the voice. That person then posts to a message board, “Hey, is that Alec Baldwin in the so-and-so ad?”. The people on the message board ponder it for a while, and determine that it is. They then e-mail their friends, “Hey, did you know that…”. And so on, until half the country knows or suspects that the spokesman is Alec Baldwin. And in the meanwhile, many of the folks who would otherwise not have encountered the ad have sought it out, just to judge for themselves. In the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were better advertising than just outright saying who it is.
That’s a really interesting point. I thought you were being sarcastic for a moment, but now I’m starting to wonder if you’re right.
Here’s an interesting article about the new anonymous celebrity voice-overs. Slate always has interesting commentaries and reviews of commercials, but this article helped explain why celebrity voice overs are getting more common.
To continue in this vein: isn’t Julia Roberts the voice of AOL?
If all they want is a vaguely recognizable celebrity voice, why pay all that money to get a Hackman voiceover, when for so much less you can get a pitch-perfect Hackman imitator.
I can do a killer Dustin Hoffman, at a tenth of Dustin’s going rate. Hey, I’m talkin’ here!
Just don’t try to imitate Tom Waits – he’ll sue!
I know that I have recognized Donald Sutherland doing some car ad (Audi?), and I remember James Coburn doing a few voice-overs before he died.