AS Chinese embrace consumerism, Western actors are in high demand for TV commercials. The roles they play reflect on the changing state of the Chinese economy.

    Steven Weathers isn’t a doctor, but he has played one on TV — in China. He has also played an engineer, a pirate and a man who watched a pretty girl go by.

    China is newly wealthy, and consumers have been on a shopping spree. That means plenty of TV ads and an unexpected opportunity for foreigners in China to become the stars of those commercials.

    Weathers, an American, was teaching literature and advertising in Shanghai when he answered his first casting call. He thought he might make a little pocket money, but TV work came pouring in. He has a look casting agents in China are hungry for — tall, fair-skinned and blue-eyed.

    Almost immediately, he noticed a trend: “Early on, most of those roles were for the foreign expert,” he says. “So I always had the lab coat, glasses, and was in the laboratory or on the design floor.”

    Even when Weathers was cast in a long underwear commercial, he was still the foreign expert. “I thought, ‘Am I going to be in the underwear?’ And they said, ‘No, no, you’re the scientist who came up with the fabric,’” he recalled.

    This kind of “expert” testimonial corresponds with a need for reassurance, says Tom Doctoroff, CEO for marketing firm J Walter Thompson Asia Pacific and author of the book “What Chinese Want.”

    Chinese citizens do not assume the world outside is safe, Doctoroff says, so lesser-known local brands might use a foreign actor in a lab coat to project reliability and scientific advancement.

    “You have people who are urbanized for the first time, owning apartments for the first time, who need household cleaning ingredients for the first time,” he says. “These are new consumers, and new consumers always need more explicit reassurance than more mature consumers.”

    There are exceptions to this trend, but they’re mostly for luxury brands calling on Hollywood A-Listers like Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman to hawk their products.

    “This type of advertising is extremely expensive to produce, and it reinforces global stature, which is always very motivating for Chinese people,” Doctoroff says.

    Casting agent Sara Shen says demand for foreign actors is so high that she’s even sent her American husband out on jobs. But the roles he is cast in have changed; he recently found himself dancing around a kitchen with some grannies and a bottle of cooking oil.

    For another job, she had to find 120 foreigners. The only requirement was that they had to be short. They were cast as porters in a fashion show.

    That’s because as consumers evolve, the foreign expert role is no longer her bread and butter.

    “When I first started the job, there was more demand for the foreign middle-aged guy to do those kinds of [foreign expert] roles,” she says. “But as China’s economy develops, people have more and more confidence as consumers.”

    That means local executives are more willing to promote their own products, rather than hiring Western stand-ins.

    Shen is also seeing a lot of work for actors who are half-Chinese and half-Caucasian, like her 4-year-old daughter, Reina.

    One recent afternoon, Reina posed with a Russian model — her “pretend mom” — for a magazine ad featuring a designer watch. Shen thinks Reina is in demand because her mixed ethnicity reflects China’s rising class of urban consumers who are more and more international.

    As for Weathers, he now anchors an English-language business show. But he said one of the last commercials he did, for milk powder, involved two Chinese experts.

    “Maybe there’s more confidence in Chinese brands,” he says, explaining the change.

    But experts say that new waves of consumers are still constantly entering the market, looking for those old reassurance cues.

    So for Westerners looking for their big break, Shen is still looking for talent — especially if you can speak authoritatively about face cream in Chinese.

    (SD-Agencies)