What Really Happened To The Geico Caveman?

What exactly does it mean when a shared cultural touchstone amounts to a dude putting on caveman makeup for an advertisement for an auto insurance company? We've got no clue. We've also got no clue about however and whoever in whatever office thought up the whole Geico caveman ad campaign along with its slogan, "So easy even a caveman can do it." But we do know that the ads were instrumental in giving an insurance company — one of the dullest kinds of companies — the gloss of cool. Also, for the record, prehistoric humans were way smarter than folks give them credit. Who figured out all that fire stuff and survived in caves in winter without central heating, hm?

Anyway. There was a modern man under the caveman prosthetics in that series of ever-evolving Geico ads — quite a few men, in fact. Per Sporting News, John Lehr, Ben Weber, Ben Wilson, Jeff Daniel Philips, and Jim Rose all played the caveman to some degree over the years. But it's McManus Woodend who played him the longest, from 2009 to 2018.

And just to show that not anyone could don the caveman's hairy brows and twisted locks, Woodend explains in a 2022 interview with the University of Southern Indiana that he beat out 1,000 other contenders while auditioning. Why did he do an interview with the University of Southern Indiana, you ask? Surprise, surprise: He's a teacher there. Not just any old teacher, but first an English teacher focusing on rhetoric and composition, and then a Digital Media teacher.

To fully follow McManus Woodend's life trajectory and see how he wound up going from caveman to pedagogue, we've got to go back to the beginning. We mean the beginning of Woodend's professional forays, not prehistory. His Geico Caveman gig — which started in 2008 — started after he finished two undergraduate degrees at Full Sail University related to filmmaking and media studies, but before he got his David Lynch MA in Film (yes, it's a thing) from Maharishi University of Management.

During this whole period, Woodend's stint as the Geico Caveman helped pay the bills along with other freelance work on this and that film-related project. One of those gigs was working as a Film Industry Outreach Liaison, making connections between Full Sail and film production companies. No matter his other successes in this role, he definitely liaised his own way to star in numerous TV commercials. 

According to the University of Southern Indiana, he saw the question "Do you want to be a caveman?" on the website of the Virginia Film Office and sent in "the world's worst acting resume." He got a reply, did his first audition in Baltimore, and eventually got picked from a final pool of six candidates, and the rest, as they say, is pre-history. Judging by Woodend's website, he did 22 total Geico commercials.  

McManus Woodend's post-Geico activities began while he was still shooting commercials. Namely, getting his Ph.D over 10 years from 2014 to 2024. Yes, these things can take that long, part-time. Given that Woodend's tenure as the caveman ended in 2018, he got through about half of his doctorate before hanging up the nose prosthetic.  

Keeping along his media studies track, Woodend got his Ph.D from the very vaguely-named European Graduate School (EGS), specializing in Literary, Musical, and Visual Thought (LMVT). True to its name, the EGS has two campuses in Europe, one in Switzerland and the other in Malta. While the program's website says that degrees entail stints of 24-day-long, on-site modules, we don't have any information on whether Woodend spent any time indulging in lush mountain and/or island vistas while completing his studies. We also don't have any information on his thesis or what specialization he chose to focus on. The EGS does, however, have a little alumni bio for Woodend on their website stating some of his standout career accomplishments.   

While chipping away at his Ph.D from afar or otherwise, Woodard snagged two adjunct faculty jobs, one at State College of Florida-Manatee-Sarasota from 2019 to 2022 and the other at the Ringling College of Art and Design from 2020 to 2022. These jobs presaged Woodard's current role teaching at the University of South Indiana. In between it all he showed up here and there on the big screen.

[Featured image by Néstor buendía via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

It's possible that viewers of the big screen might have spotted the makeup-less Geico caveman, McMahon Woodend, in some surprisingly big movies. "John Wick: Chapter 2"? Check. The criminally overlooked "Meyerowitz Stories"? Check. "BlacKkKlansman"? Check. "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum"? Check. But beyond these, there's easily his most comedically proud role on "The Incredible Jessica James" as "The Manspreader." Woodend apparently also did some camerawork on one of the last big Martin Scorsese films, "The Irishman." Granted, all these roles went uncredited and probably entailed showing up on set for half a day or whatever, but still, very cool. 

With the exception of 2021's "Slashening: The Final Beginning," all of Woodend's film roles were contained within the time span of 2017 to 2019. That's precisely before Woodend started his aforementioned teaching gigs, after he got his MA, and as his gig with Geico was nearing its end — good timing. This is around when Woodend posted his Acting and Filmmaking Reel on Vimeo, which consists largely of Geico caveman bits but does also give us a chance to behold The Manspreader on a subway. And just to demonstrate his legit-ness in realms of film and acting, Woodend's resume on his website says that he's a SAG/AFTRA member, i.e., the Hollywood-centered actor's labor union with a history going back to the 1930s.

Folks who watch McManus Woodend's acting and filmmaking reel on Vimeo might notice a wedge of scenes from a film that we haven't mentioned yet: "Rocksteppy." That full-length feature film is a Woodend original, written by, directed by, and starring Woodend along with someone who is presumably his friend or at least business colleague, Jake Dilley.

In "Rocksteppy," released in 2017, Woodend and Dilley (playing brothers Colin and Phil Beverly, respectively) embark on a roadtrip to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas in search of fame, acclaim, rock 'n' roll glory, and all that business. As "two inept small town brothers with big dreams," per the film's IMDb page, they're trailed by filmmakers mockumentary style. As the IMDb page says, the entire script was improvised along the way, and even events like Colin and  Phil's RV hitting a deer and getting wrecked were real. Billed as a David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts production — Woodend's MA alma mater, remember — Lynch himself even makes an appearance in the film. There's no word on whether Lynch passed along any filmmaking advice to Woodard.

While we don't have any information on "Rocksteppy's" inspiration, how long it was in production, or how much it cost to make, we do know that films generally cost way, way more than folks would expect. And, independent filmmakers often pay out of pocket unless they've got funding of some sort. The film has no Rotten Tomatoes reviews, but if you've got Amazon Prime, you can give it a watch.

Finally, we come to the 2024 status of McManus Woodend's odd and sinuous road, one which ends in a place where Woodend likely never expected to arrive: academia. At present, there are more articles online about Woodend — the former Geico caveman — becoming a full-time teacher than there are about any other aspect of his career, signaling that plenty of folks seem surprised by this apparent dumb guy/smart guy contradiction. But then again, that's what acting's all about, isn't it? Not being oneself.

Now in a position to give plenty of retrospective and sage advice for the next generation, Woodend does exactly this in an interview with his university, the University of Southern Indiana. "Never stop learning," he says, and, "Be patient." He continues, "I've known a lot of people that are even more talented than I am that have not gotten the breaks that they, in some way, shape, or form deserved. Stay persistent ... Because if you're not, you're going to miss that opportunity that could completely change your life." Superb advice for anyone.

Woodend taught at the University of Southern Indiana in a couple of different roles before converting to his current role very recently in August 2024. First, he taught English 101 and 201 from 2022 to 2023, and then he was an Instructor of Digital Media from 2023 to 2024. Then, he got his boost from "Instructor" to "Assistant Professor." Whether or not anyone calls him, "Professor Caveman," though, is anyone's guess.