Who Plays The Annoying Guy In The Allstate Podcast Commercial?

When it comes to insurance, it's best to listen to the experts. That's the conceit of Allstate's latest suite of commercials. The company is happy to listen to experts of all stripes. One ad centers on a protagonist who always knows what's going to fit. Another always knows which road to take.

A third Allstate ad features a podcast expert, played by Jack Plotnick. "Some people just know there's a podcast about that," says the narrator in voiceover. "Those are the people who know to choose Allstate." This is a man who has made it his mission to be well-informed in all forms of minutiae, whether it is tea, fly fishing, or if dogs know they're dogs. He even listens to a podcast about multitasking in the middle of a work meeting. Allstate customers, the ad implies, are similarly invested in attention to detail. "He knows, and he wants you to know too," the narrator continues, "just like he'd want you to know about Allstate."

Not everyone was taken with the commercial or Plotnick's performance. In the subreddit r/CommercialsIHate, some Redditors found the character to be a pedantic know-it-all. "This dude is a pompous little weirdo," wrote u/smithdaniel25. Still, nearly everyone on the subreddit agreed that Plotnick was incredibly familiar. He has over 140 acting credits to his name.

Jack Plotnick began acting in the 1990s when he secured recurring roles on "Ellen" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Although he is primarily a comedic performer, he also appeared in the period drama "Gods and Monsters" in 1998. The Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser-starring film won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

Plotnick has worked at an almost constant clip ever since; he had multi-episode arcs on "Joan of Arcadia," "The Mentalist," and "Z Nation." He played multiple characters on 15 episodes of "Reno 911!" and has brought his live comedy chops to variety and talk shows like "The Jenny McCarthy Show" and "Conan O'Brien." From 2017 to 2022, Plotnick played Paul in "Grace and Frankie."

In 2014, Plotnick made his feature-length directorial debut, the underrated parody "Space Station 76." The film follows the crew of Omega 76, a retrofuturist space station stylized to resemble the 1970s. The cast includes Liv Tyler, Matt Bomer, and Jerry O'Connell. Patrick Wilson stars as Glenn Terry, the closeted captain. "Space Station 76" combines cheesy '70s effects with suburban melodrama and malaise. Logo called it "'Spaceballs' meets 'The Ice Storm.'"

"I wanted to explore what it was like to be a child growing up in the summer of the '70s, which was my experience," Plotnick said in the same piece for Logo. He continued, "Setting it on this solitary spaceship in the middle of nowhere to me really spoke to what it would be like to be in the suburbs, be that sort of isolation and at the same time claustrophobia."