In all of her 58 years Louana Christie, EHS Class of ’85, never thought she would appear before a camera.
Movie making was for her older sister, Selina Jayne Dornan, former Eufaula mayor and who once had a career in Hollywood.
But there she was, last December, down in Texas near Austin filming a commercial for U.S. Cellular in Georgetown.
The video of her promoting the phone has aired thousands of times since first airing in June on TV and in movie theaters around the country.
The small-town girl, who is a master teacher at the Creek Nation Child Development Center, has not let her new found fame go to her head.
Her life hasn’t changed.
“Oh no, no,” she said. “I get a little embarrassed, you know, ‘cause, like I said … I wasn’t intending to get chosen (for the part).”
Her brush with fame started in December when she got a call from Selina, who frequently gets calls for auditions even though she lives in Eufaula and not California.
“She called one night and asked me if I had U.S. Cellular and I said, yeah, I have Cellular. I thought she was just calling to talk about phone service. And she said, well, ‘I got this audition come through’ -because she does a lot of auditions.
She gets a lot through her e-mails and stuff. But she’s AT&T and she couldn’t do the audition for U.S. Cellular. So she asked me to do it, and so I said, okay, you know, I said, why not? You know, just for fun I’ll come over and I’ll do it.
“She’s got the whole setup, you know, she’s got the back job, she’s got teleprompters, she’s got all that technical stuff.”
They made an audition tape and sent it to the producers.
“A couple of days later, Selina calls me and she says she got a call back.”
The call back meant she was in the running.
A few days later, on a Friday, she was chosen, along with a woman from Nebraska and two men from Wisconsin.
This was in the first few days of December.
“I was notified on Friday. They had airplane tickets ready for me on Monday and on Tuesday I was on the plane that landed in Austin and I checked into the hotel. We had wardrobe Wednesday afternoon.”
Then they practiced the handshake. A series of motions that is the focus of the video.
“We practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced. Then on Thursday morning we drove to a town 30 miles away After practicing the handshake countless times, at the last minute it was changed and they had to learn the new action.
By the end of the day it was a take, filming was done.
“On December 11th was wardrobe. ON December 12th was the actual shooting. And on December 13th, I was on the plane back to Oklahoma. So just in the matter of those four days I got back to Tulsa, and was getting into my car, and it was like, ‘What just happened?’” She didn’t know when the commercial would air.
Weeks passed. And then months.
Then one day it hit the airwaves.
“I’m walking through my living room and I hear ‘hug, shake’ and I turn around and there’s the commercial on TV,” she said.
That was around June 18.
“And it just blew up. It was everywhere. Everybody was seeing it and I even heard that they were showing it in movie theaters and it’s all over social media, like Hulu, Netflix, and on the Thunder Games.
“It was crazy.” Her four adult sons and her many friends were excited for her.
She is excited about the residual checks she receives.
But she has felt no desire to pursue acting, even though she could have joined the coveted Screen Actors Guild (SAG) because of her speaking part in the commercial.
“I think I’m going to leave the acting to my sister,” she said.
