30-Second Celebrity

By some reckonings, James F. Dean is following in Clara Peller’s lucky little footsteps.

Peller, you’ll recall, was the tiny octogenarian who gained national fame by bellowing “Where’s the Beef?” in Wendy’s hamburger commercials. (She died last August.)

Dean, 35, plays the straight-faced moderator in Wendy’s current “Hamburger A or B” TV ads featuring a series of people who pick the bad hamburger (Hamburger B) over a good burger, each time for silly reasons.

The popular, Clio-winning ads have boosted Dean’s career. He has won guest-starring roles on “Hooperman,” “Moonlighting,” “Newhart,” “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” and other TV programs.

Dean broke into the show-biz big time with a hamburger pitch after struggling for 10 years to break in as a writer and performer.

“I actually came out here to be a writer,” he said. A native of Elk Grove, Ill., Dean was the manager of Southern California’s Padua Hills Playwrights Festival for three years. His work has ranged from playing the part of a substitute translator for the deaf with the the Groundlings comedy improv group to acting in about 75 local theater productions to writing scripts that he still hopes to sell.

Off television, letting his thinning brown hair go springy and dressed in baggy chinos, tennis shoes and a bright print cotton shirt, Dean looks much looser than he appears in the Wendy’s ads, where he’s a dark-suited portrait of self-control.

“I’ve always sort of managed to make a living,” he said. He had to--he has a 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte, with wife Tracy Newman, a founding member of the Groundlings.

Dean signed with a commercial agent some years ago, but “nothing really happened,” he said, until Wendy’s came along.

Now he even expects to sell a screenplay.

“It’s the way things go--you decide you want to be an actor and all of a sudden, writing opportunities come up,” Dean said.