Guy Shelmerdine’s lasting laughs

Asking Guy Shelmerdine about the work that has shaped his two-decade long career, I’m expecting him to namecheck the evergreen comedy classic, Weetabix’s Big Day, or his more recent work for UberEats. 

Which he does – but he also launches into a witty anecdote about the first film he ever directed, for his final year show at the UK's premier art college, Central St Martins: a spec spot for a door lock company featuring clips from a home video a husband had made of his wife in the shower - and her (understandably) irate reaction. Shelmerdine found the footage on a tape left in a camera he’d bought from a pawn shop in London. “And that’s a P-A-W-N shop, not the other sort, for the avoidance of any doubt,” he deadpans. 

The industry doesn’t pivot with me, I pivot with the industry and create work that agencies and brands want to make right now.

It’s been 12 years since shots spoke to the SMUGGLER director, and while Shelmerdine’s dry sense of humour remains unchanged, his career trajectory has been nothing short of stratospheric. Back in 2011, Shelmerdine was an already established talent known for his strong line in comedy, elevated by a focus on craft, performance, characters and concept. 

Above and main image: portraits of Guy Shelmerdine by Jaime Feliu Torres.

Fast forward to 2023, and he’s not only bagged a handful of Lions (for Weetabix and Skittles’ Vertical Salon – more of which later), he’s built a reel that’s notable for its sheer breadth and variety. Unlike many comedy directors, Shelmerdine has never allowed himself to be pigeonholed with a signature style or ethos: “I always try to evolve. I've done a range of different things over the years and right now, I feel like I can mirror where the industry is. The industry doesn’t pivot with me, I pivot with the industry and create work that agencies and brands want to make right now.” 

I've been surprised by a lot of celebrity talent I've worked with recently – how actually engaged they are in the process, and how you can connect with them prior to the actual shoot

One line of work that’s proved particularly fruitful is celebrity-fronted comedy spots, with Shelmerdine coaxing surprisingly humorous performances out of some of the biggest names in showbiz. There’s Elton John and Lil Nas X, discussing their UberEats orders while sitting, surreally, on coin-operated kids’ rides in a palatial mansion (and then navigating the nuances of British slang for money). 

Elton John and Lil Nas X in Uber Eats Rides.

Or Kevin Hart, Dave Grohl, LL Cool J and Bella Poarch sharing household chores and home tech mishaps as a hilariously dysfunctional group of roommates in The Home of SiriusXM. 

“For years, I shied away from wanting to work with celebrities because I thought it would be inconvenient,” Shelmerdine admits. “They would never give you enough time or wouldn't be that interested in the commercial versus what they do in real life. But I've been surprised by a lot of celebrity talent I've worked with recently – how actually engaged they are in the process, and how you can connect with them prior to the actual shoot.”

Dave Grohl stars in The Home of SiriusXM. 

A prime example was The Showdown, part of UberEats’ phenomenally successful Tonight I’ll Be Eating…. campaign in which celebs discuss what’s on their dinner delivery tab. In a farcical Star Wars vs Star Trek face-off, veteran actors Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart meet in a deserted warehouse to exchange ridiculous tomato-based disses. “Patrick called the day before the shoot and was like: “Guy, you know, I have a process and I'd love to come and walk the stage before we shoot.” Shelmerdine remembers. “When I looked at the call sheet for the job, I realised, shit – he wants to come before the key grips. So we had to change the entire schedule. I wasn’t sure if he’d show up, but he did. He walked around and looked at everything, taking it all incredibly seriously; he was completely prepared.”

The Showdown for Uber Eats

That was an extraordinary level of commitment from an A-lister – but in general, says Shelmerdine, getting great performances from celebrity talent is simple: show enthusiasm for the process and the project - and rise above the fact you have three minutes to get three takes. As he points out, “someone like Kevin Hart is probably on a film set every day, sometimes twice a day, so you need to show a passion for what you're doing, because that's infectious and then they’ll feed off that.”

A performance-centric approach is only part of the Shelmerdine formula for comedy gold: he’s also fiercely committed to beautiful craft, born of his background in graphic design and later, art direction at the legendary Cliff Freeman & Partners agency where he started his career in advertising. “Humour is important, but if it doesn’t look good, then you’re missing something,” he says, adding that in the US – which provides the majority his jobs these days – he’s “constantly fighting against that certain type of American comedy which just feels very low-fi and un-crafted.” 

Vertical Salon – Shelmerdine’s recent multi-award-winning spot for Starburst and DDB Chicago – couldn’t be further from the scrappy style he dislikes: it’s a feat of technical wizardry and production design, made to look effortless. In the ad, created for Starburst’s new vertical candy, gravity moves in mysterious – and hilarious - ways at a beauty salon. With the conventional perspective flipped 90 degrees, it becomes clear the film is intended to be enjoyed vertically, rather than in the traditional horizontal format - just like Starburst Swirlers.

To achieve the effect, Shelmerdine built an entire set on its side, but that wasn’t the least of the gravity-defying technical challenges: the actors had to scale ladders and be tied into place on their sides, requiring frequent breaks for comfort. “It was much harder than I anticipated,” he says, “but the hardest bit was keeping it simple.”

Vertical Salon for Starburst. 

In recent years, Shelmerdine’s interest in technical design and building worlds from the ground up has led him from the world of comedy commercials into an entirely new medium: virtual reality. Through Chris Milk’s VRSE.works studio, he’s directed pioneering live-action horror experiences such as Catatonic, which saw participants strapped to a gurney and taken on a nightmarish journey through a mental asylum. 

That cheeky-slash-controversial style of comedy has aged about as well as an egg mayonnaise sandwich left out in high summer.

Another VRSE project, Night Night, featured an evil, It-like clown - in a not-so-subtle manifestation of comedy’s black underbelly. After so many years of making people laugh, did he enjoy scaring the bejesus out of them instead? “I’ve always had a darker side,” he says, citing early work like Lungs and Bacardi Fly – and, further back, the grisly humour of the Mike’s Hard Lemonade Hard Day campaign he worked on at Cliff Freeman, in which blue-collar workers shrugged off construction accidents and amputated limbs for their favourite after-work beverage (“it was all quite Monty Python, really”). 

Fly for Bacardi.

Monty Python – along with Benny Hill and the Carry On films – was Shelmerdine’s first exposure to comedy as a kid growing up in the suburban surrounds of Farnborough, Greater London, in the 70s and 80s. We laugh about the bare bottom count, but the truth is, that cheeky-slash-controversial style of comedy has aged about as well as an egg mayonnaise sandwich left out in high summer. 

 Despite everything that’s going on in the world and the effect on brands and spending, people still need comedy to smile. 

Luckily for Shelmerdine, most of his reel has stood the test of time – the wholesome humour of Weetabix Big Day, for example, making it a truly evergreen piece of comedy advertising that still gets him jobs on both sides of the Atlantic (he draws a veil over the Axe commercials from his time in directing collective Happy). 

Big Day for Weetabix. 

That’s not to say Shelmerdine is above a puerile laugh or two if the script is right. His latest campaign for Cottonelle is an exercise in toilet humour with characters literally descending into their steamy, mucky ‘down-there’s (‘harder to clean than a high-chair on spaghetti night!’), before rising triumphantly on lavatory-thrones, elevated by the superior absorbent properties of their loo roll.