The Guy Living in a Netflix Billboard 30 Feet Over Sunset Boulevard Isn’t Even in the Movie He’s Promoting
Nathan Shoop has spent more than 24 hours in a bathrobe inside a house-shaped billboard 30 feet above Sunset Boulevard, and he’s got air-conditioning, a whiteboard, and a dwindling supply of Sour Strips. The sign under him asks, “How Long Can You Survive?” The movie he’s selling stars Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, not him.
The stunt is promoting “The Last House,” a sci-fi thriller about parents and their two kids sealed inside their own home with no way out. It dropped on Netflix Friday, sits at 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and was directed by Louis Leterrier.
Shoop, 34, beat out 9 other actors for the gig, picked because he sold the “everyman” trapped in his house. He has no phone (a nod to the plot) and no Wi-Fi, which means no Netflix. Asked what he’d watch if he could, he named “72 Hours,” the Kevin Hart movie that’s topped Netflix’s film chart for two weeks straight.
That chart is the real story. Netflix is chasing a summer hit and hasn’t found one since last year’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” which still lingers in the global Top 10. Hart’s “72 Hours” pulled less than half the first-weekend views of his 2022 comedy “Me Time,” and weak revenue guidance on last month’s earnings call knocked shares down about 8 percent.
The company rarely spends on stunts like this, letting its algorithm carry promotion instead. In April it strapped Charlize Theron to a climbing rig on a Times Square billboard for “Apex.” “When you do something like this and it connects, the value is immense,” said Netflix marketing VP Jonathan Helfgot.
Shoop gets breaks to eat, sleep, and use the restroom, mostly on the ground. His gig ends Saturday night. When a New York Times reporter asked over whiteboard whether this was his best-paying union job in a while, he wrote back: “We’re being paid?”
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