If you happened to have been one of the millions of people who were tuned in to this year’s Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and New York Giants, you may have seen a commercial starring a Ferrum College grad.  Cliff Todd, ’95, who is now an actor living in Hollywood, California, made a brief but memorable appearance during an advertisement for Pepsi Max. If you missed it, you can still see it at http://www.wakeuppeople.com/?or=pw.1040. 

     Cliff is a Richmond native and majored in Theatre at Ferrum.  It was his versatile acting experiences at Ferrum with both the Jack Tale Players and the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre that he says prepared him for the hard-knock life of Hollywood. “The hands-on experience I got at Ferrum was amazing,” says Cliff. “The range of roles I was able to play gave me tremendous flexibility as an actor.  To go from rehearsing a play in two weeks and then performing it prepared me for much larger roles later in my career. I was very impressed with the drama department there because it was so small and I was able to develop great relationships with the professors. You don’t get that at a larger University.”

      Cliff and his wife, who is also an actor, continue to audition for as many roles as they can.  For the past 6 years, Cliff has been working with an in-house performance group called Groundlings Theatre, a job that he says gives him the flexibility to have the time to audition for commercial and television work. He says his experience of working with the producers for the Pepsi Max commercial was a dream come true and will help when he walks into his next audition.  “It’s not about who you know here, it’s all about who knows you,” he says.

     Ferrum College is a four-year, private, co-educational, liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Ferrum offers a choice of nationally recognized bachelor’s degree programs at a cost well below the national average for private colleges. For more information on Ferrum, visit www.ferrum.edu.