Eddie Steeples
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Eddie Steeples (born November 25, 1975 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American actor.
Long interested in an acting career, Steeples studied theater at the St. Louis Repertory and moved to New York in the mid-1990s. There he joined an experimental film group, Mo-Freek, and a hip hop group, No Surrender, to which he still belongs. Among the Mo-Freek productions he has starred in are Lost in the Bush, Caravan Summer, and People Are Dead. He also starred in the short film Whoa and appeared as a guest on The Chris Rock Show.
Steeples became nationally known when he was cast as the "Rubberband Man" in a series of award-winning commercials for OfficeMax, featuring the 1976 song "The Rubberband Man" by The Spinners. Steeples' performance in those commercials led him to be named one of the "World's Sexiest Men" of 2004 by People magazine. He has also appeared in the feature movie Torque, starring Ice Cube, Faison Love, and Jaime Pressly.
Steeples appeared in the movie Akeelah and the Bee, starring Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett, released in April 2006. An independent movie written and directed by Doug Atchison, Robbers, is now in post-production, and Steeples has recently starred in a new Mo-Freek production called "When Is Tomorrow", which he co-wrote and co-produced with Kevin Ford.
Steeples appears as Darnell Turner (also known as "Crab Man") in the sitcom My Name Is Earl, which premiered September 20, 2005. In the episode Stole P's HD Cart, he parodied his role as Rubberband Man. In this episode, the show's main characters worked together briefly in an office. Darnell's assigned task was to distribute office supplies out of a shopping cart.
Steeples was in Thailand on December 26, 2004, and survived the Asian tsunami which left approximately 230,000 people throughout the Indian Ocean region dead or missing.