Here’s What Happened To The Brother And Sister From The Notorious Folgers Coffee Ad
Imagine being an unknown actor desperately trying to jumpstart your career. You book a job in a commercial and wonder if maybe — just maybe — this is your big break. Then the world decides the ad is weird and wrong and hilarious and makes fun of it for a decade! Ouch. That’s exactly what happened to two young performers from an infamous 2009 coffee ad. Whatever became of them, though?
The 2009 commercial
Cast your mind back to the late 2000s. Specifically, the festive period. Do you remember seeing an advert for Folgers coffee featuring a certain reunited sister and brother? A pair of siblings whose relationship seemed perfectly lovely? Except, here’s the thing. Maybe it wasn’t lovely. Maybe there was something weird going on beneath the surface.
Becoming a meme
If you know what we’re talking about, then you’re probably also aware of the hilarious meme culture that sprang up around the commercial. All of a sudden, this supposedly heart-warming piece of wrong became the laughing stock of the internet. For example, when a jokey tweet from writer Nicole James about the ad was posted on Tumblr in 2012, it received more than 200,000 responses.
The parody era
Pretty soon, Chelsea Handler and Daniel Tosh were parodying the commercial. And periodically, outlets such as The Daily Dot, BuzzFeed, and Uproxx would dredge it back into the light of day with scathing articles. Oh, and YouTube channel Above Average mocked the ad and revealed, once and for all, that the siblings were — ahem — closer than they should have been.
Coming Home — a description
What exactly happened in the ad to cause such a reaction, though? Well, in “Coming Home” — its official name — a young man returns to his family home in a taxi. It’s deep in the Christmas season, snow is all around, and the house is twinkling. When a teenage girl answers the door, he says, “I must have the wrong house.”
