Since time immemorial – or since 2008, if you’re a millennial or older – Flo from Progressive has been dropping 30-second non-sequiturs during sitcom ad breaks in the name of selling you car insurance.
As insurance commercial spokespeople go, Flo is more straightforward than most: Not a caveman, a pile of money with eyes, a small lizard, or Dean Winters, she is simply a person who sells insurance. Sure, sometimes she opens an insurance-themed amusement park or hobnobs with celebrities, but at her core, she remains like us, the common folk. Now, the performer who plays her? She’s high up on a pedestal, enjoying the benefits of fame and a long-running series of international commercials. She probably gets great insurance. Who is she, anyway?
Meet Flo from Progressive
The ubiquitous Flo from Progressive is played by one Stephanie Courtney, best known as, you know. Flo from Progressive. She’s done other stuff, too.
A native of Stoney Port, New York, Courtney recalled in a 2015 piece for Cosmopolitan that she’d grown up attending Broadway shows, admiring classic performances and emulating them in school plays and local productions. Falling fully in love with acting during early adulthood, she moved to LA with her sister in 1997 and joined The Groundlings, the improv theater that gave us Paul Reubens, Phil Hartman, Lisa Kudrow, and Kristen Wiig. She performed stand-up, toured performing musicals for elementary schools, and wrote and performed a semi-autobiographical play with her sister in 2000, titled Those Courtney Girls.
Meanwhile, the performer started picking up small roles in movies and television shows. An early connection with Bob Odenkirk landed her gigs on HBO’s Mr. Show and the future Better Call Saul star’s 2003 feature film Melvin Goes to Dinner. Bit parts on ER, Mad Men, and Tim and Eric followed.
But the work she’d be best known for began in late 2007 when Courtney was chosen as the latest in a glut of Progressive commercial spokespeople. She described the gig as “such a 180” in the life of a struggling actor, defining her work life. Luckily, she says that the enormous amount of makeup and hair styling that goes into breathing life into the character also affords Courtney a modicum of privacy in her day to day – she claims that she’s never had a drink sent over at the bar by way of recognition, or to have been honked at in traffic by big fans of Progressive.
That said, she does belong to an elite group of professional spokespeople, forming bonds of support with AT&T’s Milana Vayntrub during the latter’s public call for civility circa 2020.