When Elliot Hamilton’s face appeared in , no one at the Midtown Manhattan party where he was watching the game noticed.
They were talking about Bad Bunny’s halftime show.
Hamilton, 31, had known the advertisement would air during the game, but he had no idea when. By the fourth quarter, he was starting to suspect that something had gone wrong.
“Was I lied to?” he wondered.
Elliot Hamilton, a Lafayette native and Loyola graduate, is an actor living in New York City. He recently landed his first national commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl. He is pictured here filming the Base 44 commercial.
Provided photo
When the advertisement came on, it was the culmination of years of auditioning and near-misses — his first commercial to air nationally. But around him, the conversation continued uninterrupted.
“I said, ‘Who was that guy?’ to my friends, but they were still talking about Bad Bunny,” Hamilton said.
Within seconds, though, his phone began lighting up. Texts poured in from Louisiana — from high school friends in Lafayette, from Loyola classmates all over, from his family who had been sworn to secrecy.
At 31, the Lafayette native had just made his national advertising debut on the biggest television night of the year.
Two weeks later, not much had changed.
Hamilton still auditions regularly — about two to three times a week for commercials, web shows and television roles. He still works weekends at a Brooklyn restaurant that specializes in Southern food. During the week, he coaches youth baseball. He buys and resells baseball cards for extra money.
He performs stand-up comedy five nights a week, mostly at open mics. He runs a show at Freddy's Bar and often performs at O'Keefe's Bar & Grill, Halyard's Bar and Young Ethel's — all in Brooklyn.
Elliot Hamilton in the early days of doing stand up comedy at Carrollton Station in New Orleans.
Provided photo
“In acting,” he said, “you audition for like 8 billion things and never get anything — and then something just appears.”
The Super Bowl commercial was his second national advertisement, but the first one he shot never aired.
Choosing sports, then a return to acting
Hamilton graduated from Episcopal School of Acadiana in 2013 and earned an economics degree from Loyola University New Orleans in 2017.
Acting, for most of that time, lived in the background.
He had always liked performing. As a child, his mom says he was unusually verbal. He memorized the presidents and could recite them to a crowd. He enjoyed performing. Then, somewhere around middle school, sports took over.
Mark Broussard, his high school baseball coach at Episcopal School of Acadiana, said that during the Super Bowl advertisement, he first recognized his former student's voice and then he realized it was Hamilton on television.
Hamilton is grateful for his time on the baseball field — despite it taking him away from theater and performing.
“In junior high and high school, if you do anything other than sports, kids make fun of you,” Hamilton said. “So, I leaned into that.”
Elliot Hamilton, on the right, acted in this Loyola production of "The Bear" in 2017.
Provided photo
He was part of his small high school's theater productions, which were directed by Kat Surratt Movassaghi. She says she loves seeing former students pursuing paths of the arts in today's world.
“I always knew there was something special about him on the stage. He had a dry wit and good comic timing,” Movassaghi said.
Despite his ease on the stage, Hamilton chose to major in economics at Loyola and didn’t return to acting until his senior year, when he took a theater elective. He auditioned for a campus play and landed the lead.
“All the theater kids were like, ‘Who’s this econ major getting the lead in our play?’” his father, Dr. Scott Hamilton of Lafayette, said.
For Elliot Hamilton, getting back on stage felt less like a detour and more like a correction.
“I remembered how much I liked it,” he said. “I was like, why did I ever get away from this?”
In 2013, Elliot Hamilton graduated from the Episcopal School of Acadiana in Cade. He is pictured here with: Eleanor Schutte, Anju Mapilly, Fatima Fazal, Rami Dibbs, Bailey Brown, Hamilton, Camille LeJeune, Nick Bares and Henry Lowry.
Provided photo
From accounting to waiting tables
After graduating from Loyola in 2017, he took a job in accounting in New Orleans. He worked in an accounting firm for four years while quietly auditioning for independent films and small roles in New Orleans, where the film industry was booming at the time.
He signed with an agent. He auditioned constantly.
Nothing landed.
Then, in 2021, he booked a role in an Amazon series that was set to shoot in New Orleans. On his first day on set, production shut down because of COVID exposure. Soon after, he learned his scene had been written out.
“It was really devastating,” he said.
Elliot Hamilton is pictured here acting in an independent horror film.
Provided photo by Victoria Kemp
Two weeks later, he booked a small role in AMC’s “Mayfair Witches.” That one did film. It was enough to convince him the grind might lead somewhere.
After he was fired from his accounting job, he leaned further into acting and performing.
“I just didn’t care about becoming a better accountant,” he said. “If I don’t have full interest in something, it’s very hard for me to apply myself. But if I do, I kind of obsess over it.”
He began waiting tables in New Orleans — and the money was good. Then he moved to New York in 2022, chasing broader opportunity. He says the first few months in the Big Apple felt like an adventure. He clicked with the pace of life immediately.
“Every day I got up, I was excited,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s going to be interesting.”
Pumping gas and patching tires in Lafayette
Elizabeth Fournet Hamilton, his mother, describes her son as positive and hardworking.
“He auditions every day,” she said. “He hasn’t given up.”
Dr. Scott Hamilton, Elizabeth Hamilton with their children, Quinn Hamilton, Aurore Hamilton and Elliot Hamilton in Lafayette.
Provided photo
Like many parents, she hopes her son will one day buy a house and settle into financial stability. As parents, the Hamiltons have watched their son navigate the ups and downs of the arts with surprising tranquility.
“He doesn’t mind the uncertainty,” she said.
Elliot Hamilton acknowledges the instability. Acting pays well when the jobs come, he said, but the challenge is never knowing when that will be.
“I don’t want to be stuck just working side hustles forever,” he said. “But I always have confidence that I’ll figure it out.”
Work has never intimidated him. As a teenager, he spent summers working at his grandfather Howard Fournet’s Chevron station on Johnston Street in Lafayette — pumping gas, patching tires and cleaning the service bay in the heat.
From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., six days a week.
“It taught me a lot about being hot outside in the summer,” he said with a laugh.
His mother’s brother, Brian Fournet, ran the service station. It was the Fournets — his mother’s large, lively and loud family of storytellers — who shaped his instincts on stage.
“The only way to get their attention is if you tell a good story,” Elliot Hamilton said. “They all talk over each other. If you don’t hook them, they won’t listen.”
That lesson translates easily to stand-up comedy.
After the cameras cut away
Since the Super Bowl, he has been testing the story of the unnoticed commercial at open mics. It usually works. Still, he admits it feels awkward. He’s not completely comfortable talking about the experience.
“It feels self-congratulatory,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, I was in a Super Bowl commercial.’”
In reality, the moment was less glamorous than it looked from afar. At the party in Manhattan, he eventually had to tell friends what they had missed. They pulled up the commercial on YouTube and replayed it.
He still appreciates the element of surprise.
“I think it’s more fun if your face just comes on the screen and people have no idea it’s going to,” he said.
He knows building a career today is nearly impossible without the likes and follows. The industry, he knows, now runs on visibility. Social media followers matter. Short clips matter. Recognition matters.
Even still, Elliot Hamilton appreciates the other indicators of success.
“As long as I feel like I’m making progress, I’m comfortable,” he said.
Most viewers saw him for a few fleeting seconds during the Super Bowl. The rest of the work — the auditions, open mics, restaurant shifts and coaching sessions — continues long after the cameras cut away.
Back home in Louisiana, they noticed.
Elliot Hamilton grew up in a large, loud Louisiana family where stories competed for air, and attention had to be earned.
In New York, on small stages and in crowded audition rooms, he’s still earning it.
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