B.J. Novak Is Surprised To Find Out He’s The Face Of Ponchos And Face Paint Overseas

B.J. Novak, the creator and host of the new Hulu anthology series, The Premise, has come face to face with the real-life premise of a comical twist of errors that led to his likeness being used to push face paint and cologne in foreign lands.

In a recent Instagram story, B.J. shared the packaging for a brand of face paint sold in Uruguay called Rainbow Art, which features him smiling mildly towards the packaged tubes of product. Turns out there were slightly different versions of the same photo used to market rain ponchos, cologne, men’s electric shavers, and beard trimmers. But how? Why?

B.J., who’s best known for playing the somewhat dickish character Ryan Howard in The Office, explained his side job moonlighting as the literal face of these products, saying, “Years ago, someone mistakenly put an image of me on a public domain site, and now apparently I am on products all around the world, but I am too amused to do anything about it.”

He’s having fun with it all, like you’d hope he would, and his Twitter account has been filled with jokey replies and jabs coming from friends and fans over the past couple days.

“No puede ser esto que dice” writes Twitter handle @_artvandelay.

“es la verdad” B.J. responds.

“I don’t know you had a Greek poncho range?” jokes @lawrence_shaw

“I’m international,” vollies B.J.

As the days are long and the nights are weird, this isn’t the first time that a celebrity’s face has been used to hock products outside of America. A quick dive into Google and YouTube will produce endless results in the way of Sylvester Stallone selling ham and Nicolas Cage selling what looks to be nightmares in Japan, but these celebs probably got paid quite a lot for it. Let’s hope that B.J. at least got to keep the face paint. Halloween is coming up quick, after all.