Terry Crews’ Amazon Cosplay

“They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house. I’m not made of stone.”

This Krusty The Clown line from a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, his justification for allowing his name to be used on a series of inferior products, is one that will no doubt resonate with countless actors. It’s not hard to see why actors and other celebrities are so easily seduced by advertisement work; it’s lucrative, and for relatively little hard graft. Most of the time, the results are fairly benign, sometimes they even manage to be funny or have genuine artistic merit. Just as often, the results are simply cringily laughable. Johnny Depp playing his guitar in the desert, his jet-black dyed hair and abundant jewellery hanging over his fifty eight year old frame on behalf of Sauvage fragrance springs to mind. On occasion they’re just downright bizarre, such as Tom Hiddlestone’s utterly baffling ad for Centrum vitamin supplements, which thankfully for Tom was only shown in China.

Sometimes, though, the results are far from benign. How many times have you witnessed an artist you admire lending their name and face to products made by companies with questionable practices? Ray Winstone, for example, is one of the finest actors Britain has ever produced, his hard-man image belying a depth and range that has produced some incredibly sensitive and nuanced performances. Even with a body of work such as his, it’s now hard to see past his long-term association with online betting company Bet365, his ad campaigns omnipresent during live football coverage, with big Ray’s glowering face imploring viewers to ‘bet in play, narrr’. Sometimes these ads are quickly forgotten about, or little-seen, sometimes they do some measure of damage to the artist’s credibility.

But a new low was undoubtedly reached recently.

Terry Crews, actor and former NFL linebacker, recorded a promotional video on behalf of Amazon. Since it first went live on the company’s TikTok channel a couple of weeks ago, the video quickly went viral on the platform and Twitter, with reactions to it falling somewhere between negative and enraged, and when you watch it, it’s not hard to see why. I’m struggling to think of a clip as short as this one (coming in at exactly thirty seconds) that has provoked such a vociferous reaction. In those thirty seconds, there really is a lot to think about.

Just to be clear, this is not an anti-Terry Crews diatribe. Crews is an extremely likeable screen presence — no doubt why Amazon chose him — who has shown great comic timing in films like Idiocracy and TV series’ Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Everybody Hates Chris. But it’s hard to fathom the thought process that would enable an already-wealthy man to cast his scruples so far aside that he would be able to take part in something that instantly begins at high-cringe, and goes rapidly downhill.

We open on Terry outside an unspecified Amazon warehouse, grinning with the kind of glee you’d usually only find on the face of a child about to be given a tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. “We’re here,” he says, barely able to contain his excitement, and his tour, and ours, begins in earnest.

“I heard Amazon was hiring a bajillion people,” says his voiceover, as he joins a worker on a conveyor belt. Obviously he’s exaggerating when he says a bajillion people, this being such a light hearted joy-fest, but Amazon do indeed hire a huge amount of people, mainly due to the high turnover of staff unable to cope with the strict conditions and demands placed upon them and the injuries workers often incur — at the Staten Island plant for example, worker injuries are three times higher than the national average according to the company’s own reports filed with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The rate of ambulance call outs to UK warehouses is also worryingly high, with 600 call outs in the UK between 2015 and 2018 alone. They are also notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to firing employees, so they need to keep them rolling in.

“I thought I’d take a look for myself,” Terry says. Easy enough when you’re invited, not so easy for the journalists who have had their requests to take a look for themselves blocked or ignored, or for the elected officials who had the police called on them when they attempted to do likewise, as happened to Rep. Rashida Tlaib when she visited a Michigan warehouse to check on working conditions.

Next, we see Terry chilling out with a fellow employee in a staff break room. The room looks inviting enough, full of well-stocked vending machines. Not that he’d have much time to avail himself of any of them in reality; worker’s breaks are so short, and the facilities so vast, that break time would be likely to be all-but over by the time he got to the rest area. Here though, he’s seen relaxing with another member of staff, neither of them looking like they’ve had to urinate in bottles.

“So Amazon does pay for tuition?” Crews asks his new friend.

“Yep.”

And technically, she’s not lying. With the high turnover of staff, though, few will ever see such a benefit, and those that do will be strictly limited in their choices of both schools and areas of study. There is no allowance for study time factored into the ‘benefit’, and one study estimated that it would take an employee up to sixteen years to obtain a degree this way, and that Amazon will rarely pay for full tuition. Interestingly, Terry discusses these almost notional benefits while sporting a gold Panerai watch that costs more than an Amazon worker’s annual salary and would comfortably cover the full college tuition costs of two employees. Yeah, the optics on this really are quite bad.

“Hi Savannah,” he shouts to another colleague as he merrily skips around a crate full of boxes, wrapping it with a giant roll of cling film now, with his safety vest, mask and gloves, fully immersed in his factory worker cosplaying. Fortunately for both Terry and Savanah, they are at least able to move around the facility unencumbered by the worker cages that Amazon patented in 2016, before quietly shelving them after executives described it as ‘a bad idea’.

The best is yet to come for Terry though, his eyes positively lighting up as he spots a forklift truck gliding gracefully along the warehouse.

“Wait, I get to drive a forklift?”

Well he might, but he might also want to keep in mind what happened to Amazon worker Philip Lee Terry in 2017.

The 59 year old was crushed to death in an Indiana facility while carrying out maintenance work on a forklift. An investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Amazon was at fault for failing to certify Lee to operate a forklift. The state cited the company for four safety violations and applied a $28,000 fine. After Amazon appealed the decision, state labour officials accepted Amazon’s version of events, laying all the blame with Lee himself. This happened while Gov. Eric Holcomb was keen for Amazon to open up another facility in the state.

All of this is clearly far from Terry’s mind as he implores viewers to ‘check it out for yourself’.

This isn’t just an advert, this is corporate propaganda at its ugliest, featuring a man with an estimated net worth of $25m laughing it up with workers who endure poor conditions, pay and treatment at the hands of the company who are further lining his pockets. Understandably, Crews has been ridiculed and criticised for his part in it.

Will it affect Crews’ future work prospects? That is, his acting work prospects, as he is unlikely to need to seek actual work in an Amazon warehouse anytime soon, as fun as he may have found it. Well, given the reaction to the ad, he will certainly be hoping it doesn’t get an entry on his IMBD page. Ultimately though, it probably won’t harm his career much, if at all, unless the many threats to boycott his future work give casting directors pause for thought. The damage to his image and credibility with viewers, however, may be a little harder to quantify, and this blot on his CV may be one the Crews lives to regret.