Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Actor Aaron never pictured himself as a Covid poster boy
WHEN dreaming of becoming an actor, Aaron Hickland wouldn’t have imagined ending up as a poster boy during a pandemic.
With government advice and guidance being shared everywhere – from the internet to TV and bus shelter ads across the country – someone was always going to have to be the relatable face of Covid safety.
And that honour fell to the Belfast man who you might recognise from campaign adverts in the past few weeks.
He said: “My agent sent me an email saying an ad agency was looking for actors for this role so I went and had the audition with the company.
“When you’re an actor you just assume that, with all your auditions, you’re never going to get them but the agency was really lovely. A couple of days later I got an email from them saying they’d given me the role.”
But does Aaron have any idea what makes someone the perfect candidate for this type of job?
“That’s a good question,” he laughed. “I haven’t a clue. All my friends were joking with me about whether this role makes me the dastardly villain infecting everyone or whether I’m just the naive person who doesn’t follow guidelines. I’ll leave that up to other people to decide.”
Nevertheless, Aaron enjoyed the chance to take on the part.
He added: “In the audition they told us what it was and I thought it was pretty cool, it’s obviously an important thing to do.
“It’s only really hit me from seeing all the posters how big it was going to be. How your face is just everywhere all of a sudden.”
Aaron revealed his friends and family have been reacting to seeing his face all over too.
He said: “It’s ample fuel for my friends to slag me for the next few years at least.
“My family love it, of course, they think I can do no wrong, but with my friends they’ve been all about the slagging.”
His role in the campaign isn’t unlike that of Joey Tribbiani in Friends when he became the face of venereal diseases, although admittedly Aaron’s is less embarrassing.
He added: “I think there’s something funny about it. Definitely the Joey thing came to mind but there’s also a part of me that thinks, hopefully in a few years time, there won’t need to be Covid ads any more and this ad will be this weird piece of history. So that’s a unique thing to be part of.
“The TV ad is called Pass It On. It’s sort of a first-person perspective of this person being invited into this social gathering. A women let’s the person in and tells them to go join the gathering. They go in and I’m in there with a load of friends.
“Then me – being the dastardly man that I am – offers the person a drink. You can see the ad, germs are passed from me on to this other person.
“Then later that person goes home, goes to their granny’s home to visit, and they pass the germs on to her. So it’s this idea of these social gatherings and how you can pass on germs without even realising.”