He may have just recently decided to return to football but these days, Tom Brady has been busy with acting gigs too. At a time when more and more celebrities are starring in commercials, the NFL star has agreed to be the face of Hertz, starring in a series of commercials that promote the company’s fleet of EVs.
That said, Brady’s not alone. Since the start, the athlete has been starring in the ads alongside Alyssa Limperis who is only known in the commercials as Alyssa.
Who Is Alyssa Limperis?
Limperis is a comedian at heart. She discovered her passion for the genre growing up, thanks to her father.
“My dad and I watched a lot of comedy when I was growing up. He was a really funny guy. He was a sheet metal salesman, but he loved comedy. He loved making people laugh. He brought me up on The Three Stooges, The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy…lots of big physical comedy,” Limperis recalled.
“We actually did some sketch comedy together. I was playing some wacky hairdresser and he was dodging my scissors as he was hopping out of the way. We were goofs together. That started my love for comedy.”
When she got older, she started to do comedy professionally. “In college, I started doing improv,” Limperis continued. “Once I got to the city, I did more stand-up and improv…” She also eventually moved to New York but then she got a call and learned that her dad had a tumor.
“Everything about my life changed in that exact moment. I moved home (New England) and took care of my dad,” Limperis said. Her father passed away from brain cancer in 2015. Three months later, Limperis did her first comedy performance.
“I remember it clear as day. It was in some comedy theater in Brooklyn. The theater’s gone now. A friend had a 30-minute slot and told me, ‘You got 30 minutes of something you want to say.’ I said yes. I asked my friend, May, ‘Hey, you wanna come over and just run through some stuff?’ And I wrote out some jokes, and I hit them back and forth with her, and I did it,” she told Digital Trends.
“I think that going onstage and doing that made me like, ‘Oh, I’m changed. This is how I have to do comedy. This feels right. This is it.’”
More recently, Limperis has also been starring in the Peacock comedy special called No Bad Days.
“It’s a show about grief and loss, so you should expect that we’re going to be talking about those themes. But what you might not expect is that at times it can feel like either a normal comedy special or a variety show,” she said.
“There are a lot of moving parts. I move a lot. It’s a joyful ride on a dark topic, and I like that contrast because I feel like that’s a lot of what grief and darkness is.”
Alyssa Limperis Also Became Known For Her Mom Videos
As she continued pursuing stand-up, Limperis also ventured into social media, specifically TikTok. Here, the actress/comedian would readily impersonate her mom after she unexpectedly became an inspiration.
“My mom actually moved in with me in New York after my dad died just to sort of get out for a bit,” Limperis said. “I just was watching her behave in such a way [like] none of my friends. I was like 20. It just was such a different lifestyle.”
And while not all mothers may want to be impersonated by their daughters, this worked out well.
“So she was very integral in the process of making them, which was always important to me because I felt like it was a collaborative effort that we were doing it together versus me poking fun at her,” Limperis explained.
“It was like we were both making light of the situation and it was so heavy around my dad stuff that I think having this thing that was bright and fun between the two of us.”
Working With Tom Brady Has Been A ‘Beautiful Thing’
For Limperis, working with Brady in the Hertz commercials has been such a big deal because her father was a fan of the NFL star. “It was this beautiful thing because my dad was a really big fan of Tom Brady,” she said.
“My mom wanted to try to get Tom Brady to come visit him when he was sick. I don't think she ever followed through with it, but there was this beautiful moment where I was like, 'I'm doing this special where I'm talking about my dad, and I'm meeting my dad's hero, and he's wonderful, and we're ribbing each other, and we're having fun'.”
In Brady, Limperis also found someone that she can readily improv with. “The best part was that they let me improvise a lot. At a certain point, the line was, 'You're from California, aren't you?' or something. I was like, 'I'm from Boston,' and then I dropped into a Boston accent. I was like, 'You remember Boston?' Without skipping a beat, he dropped into a Boston accent, and then there was the two of us sitting in chairs, talking in Boston accents. I was like, 'This is pretty cool'."
No doubt, Limperis’ father would be so proud.
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