Who Are The Vampires In The HP 'Print At Night' Commericials?

If you pay attention to commercials, or if you just watch a lot of television, you may have noticed an amusing series of ads for HP Instant Ink, a new service from Hewlett-Packard that delivers printer ink to your door for a subscription fee. The ads, which clearly owe a little something to FX's "What We Do In The Shadows," feature a vampire couple who can't go out to buy ink in the daytime but really love to print stuff on their HP printer. The male vampire prints photos of the two of them from different eras, featuring the exact same poses in various questionable outfits. The female vampire makes prints of her abstract artwork, all of which turn out to depict bats. There's also one with a fun effect where the female vampire brushes her hair in front of a mirror, which, of course, just shows the hairbrush floating in the air.

The couple is very well-cast, good-looking but more awkward and nerdy (especially the guy) than you usually expect from vampires, at least outside of the aforementioned "What We Do In The Shadows." But who are they? They're not exactly famous actors, but they might look familiar. Fortunately, we've done the research and have those answers for you.

The male half of the vampire couple is portrayed by Tom Musgrave, a mustachioed character actor whose TV and film work has been pretty minimal so far. Still, you might recognize him from the first season of FX's "Fargo," in which he plays Bo Munk, a coworker of Martin Freeman's ill-fated Lester Nygaard. He also appeared in the Coen Brothers' underrated 2016 comedy "Hail, Caesar!" His character goes unnamed, but he's pretty memorable as one of the communist writers who amiably hold George Clooney's Baird Whitlock hostage. He holds his own in really strong company alongside well-known character actors such as David Krumholtz, Fisher Stevens, and Fred Melamed.

Although Musgrave hasn't done a lot, he seems to have the eye of Joel and Ethan Coen, considering his appearances in "Hail, Caesar!" and the Coen-produced "Fargo." If they're fans of his work, that bodes well for his future as an idiosyncratic character, exactly the kind of talent they're known for hiring again and again.

Musgrave's partner in the commercials is Beth Dover, an actor whose been working on TV since her teenage years. She got her start on a series called "Welcome Freshman" and also appeared on "Kenan & Kel," the 1990s Nickelodeon sitcom that starred future SNL mainstay Kenan Thompson. Dover continued working into adulthood, with guest appearances on a wide variety of shows, from "Guiding Light" to "Criminal Minds" to "Brooklyn Nine-Nine." She was a regular on the dating reality show parody "Burning Love," working alongside comedy greats Michael Ian Black, June Diane Raphael, and Ken Marino. She also played Blanche, the troubled head maid, on the Comedy Central series "Another Period."

If you recognize Beth Dover from anything in the last few years, however, it's probably the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black." She played Linda Ferguson, a vice president of the private company that ran the prison where that series is set. Her role increased in both screentime and overt malevolence over the course of the series until she was the primary villain of the final season.

The charming commercials are directed by Rob McElhenney, one of the creators of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," who also plays Mac on that show. Beth Dover and Tom Musgrave have excellent chemistry in the HP vampire ads, and it's easy to imagine that they might both win future roles on the basis of the fun they seem to be having as printer-obsessed creatures of the night. 

Time will tell if the ad campaign rolls out more TV spots featuring the vampire characters, but considering how charming they've been so far, it would be fun if they did. Each ad is a silly little nugget of vampire-based comedy, cleverly deflating the idea that vampires are universally suave and cool without directly copying the characters from "What We Do in the Shadows" who perform a similar comedic function. In fact, considering that show's habit of bringing in actors who've played vampires in other projects, maybe we'll see this couple turn up on that show. 

Stranger things have happened.