The huge flash blinded them.
Their ears rung as if from a bomb’s explosion, and a sharp pain shot across their backs, the motors of their motorcycles beneath them still buzzing.
Slowing down, Seth Thomas and his father, Kevin Thomas, pulled over from the two-lane mountain road and looked at each other in shock.
“Did we seriously just get struck by lightning?” Seth remembers asking his father on May 20, 2012.
A huge thunderstorm in rural eastern Tennessee had finally caught up to them as they cruised toward Illinois as part of a father-and-son motorcycle trip.
Almost 10 years later, the two have moved past the experience. But thanks to that lightning strike, Seth Thomas of Durham will star in a Super Bowl commercial with his father that will air to tens of millions of viewers.
The ad is for Wallbox, a company that makes, of all things, electric vehicle chargers.
“Since that day, electricity and I, we don’t get along very well,” Seth Thomas says in the 15-second ad.
It’s Wallbox’s first big commercial and will air in the second quarter of Sunday’s big game. Seth Thomas is cast as a lightning strike survivor who is afraid of electricity. He is shown using a long pole to flip on light switches from a distance and powers his washing machine using a treadmill. He flinches when a mosquito zapper crackles.
In the commercial, one of Wallbox’s compact chargers is his solution to overcoming his fears of charging his electric vehicle.
“If Seth can do it, so can you,” the company says in a news release.
Road to the 56th Super Bowl
Seth Thomas never aspired to be on the big screen. He recently moved to Durham with his wife after nine years in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg and elsewhere. He has now transitioned into a career in coding.
“I’ve got no background in acting whatsoever,” Thomas, 30, told The News & Observer.
But his father, Kevin, has been a background actor for movies and television shows for eight years in the Chicago area, having made a major career transition after working in the nuclear power industry for 23 years.
Kevin Thomas, 59, always hoped Seth or his other son, Hunter, would get into acting.
A chance came in December when Kevin Thomas found a casting call for the Wallbox ad.
“So this one says, ‘This is a long shot. We’re looking for lightning survivors, lightning strike survivors.’ And I looked at that and thought, ‘Well, you know, I’m one of those,” said Kevin Thomas in an interview.
During the commercial’s audition, Kevin knew exactly what he was doing when the casting directors asked to see his acting skills. For Seth, not so much.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I completely bombed this,’” Seth recalls thinking. “Five days later, I get a call back: ‘Hey, we want to fly you to L.A. to shoot this commercial.’
“Next thing I know, I’m on set in Hollywood, with my dad shooting a commercial,” Seth said.
And not just any commercial but an ad on the biggest stage possible. Last year, almost 92 million people watched the Super Bowl, with over 100 million viewers in 2020.
Ad rates for the Super Bowl this year go up to $6.5 million per 30-second ad, NBC reported.
A longer 60-second version of the commercial was filmed, and Wallbox will be releasing more commercials, one of which will feature Seth’s father, according to Adweek.
In reality, Seth Thomas can relate to the circumstances portrayed in the Wallbox ad, albeit more mildly.
“The most that has come out of it is a slight fear of electricity,” said Thomas. “Like, I won’t do my own (electric) housework. Which is kind of funny.”
That means he won’t use jumper cables on his car. When he arrived home after being gone for months in the Army to find his car battery dead, he had to get a neighbor to help.
He also has tinnitus, or occasional ringing in his ears, but he said he’s not sure if that’s from the lightning or being in the military.
Kevin Thomas says he’s “definitely more careful” around electricity than he used to be since the experience.
An electrifying experience
In 2012, Seth and his father were on a 10-day motorcycle road trip traveling to different military colleges after he graduated from Norwich University in Vermont.
The pair’s last stop was the University of North Georgia. Then they departed to Illinois to end their trip with Kevin riding a Harley-Davidson Road King and Seth on a vintage 1979 Honda CX500.
On the day of the lightning strike, a huge dry thunderstorm began descending on them. Visible lightning began to appear in the mountain valley they rode through, and rain started to fall. But there was nowhere to pull over on the mountain roads, so they kept going.
“It was not a good experience, but it was funny, it was exhilarating,” said Seth.
Then the lightning hit. The pair believe it struck the ground a few feet away from them, and they marveled that they weren’t seriously injured or that their motorcycles weren’t damaged.
Now, they both find it funny that the lightning strike has given them the most unusual father-son bonding moment — again. For Kevin, it fulfills his dream of taking his son to his new place of work.
“It was very weird to have this show up 10 years later, and actually be part of the career that I’m doing now and be able to go in and re-enact something that happened to us,” Kevin Thomas said.
For Seth Thomas, he enjoyed spending more time with his father, who he doesn’t get to see as often now as an adult.
“I’ve been in the military for … like, nine years. And this is the most time I’ve spent with my dad,” he said. “If I’m fortunate for one thing, even though it was kind of a terrible thing that happened to us 10 years ago, at least I can hang out with my dad for a little bit, which is kind of nice.”
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