Aaron Rodgers Feels the Wrath of Ms. K's Glare

If you thought it was ironic that the longtime Packers fan in Associated Bank's new Aaron Rodgers ad campaign lives in Chicago, you'll definitely enjoy this secondary twist.

The other actress in the hair salon ad — the Bears fan who glares at Rodgers and his friend "Edith" as they get a perm — is played by Whitefish Bay's own Gerry Kasik, a devout lifelong Packers fan.

Until she was contacted for this article, she had only admitted to one person — her oldest son — that she played a Bears fan in the commercial.

"I kept it as a suprise, but that’s only because my family would have excommunicated me — and we’re not even Catholic," she joked.

Rodgers can be seen in two Associated Bank ads with Edith. The gist of the hair salon commercial, according to Dawn Riedel, the bank’s director of marketing and branding, is two elderly women — one a Packers fan, the other a Bears fan — who have been going to the same salon for years have formed a competitive relationship by trading football barbs every week.

“They talk smack about football all the time, so for 'Edith' to come in with Aaron Rodgers put her over the top,” Riedel said.

Riedel said Kasik originally tried out for the role of Edith, but when she auditioned, they thought she would better fit the role of the Bears fan.

“She nailed it,” Riedel said. “She was exactly what we were looking for in a Chicago fan.”

Kasik was a in her role as a study hall monitor at . She said the glare she gave Edith and Rodgers is the same glare that high school kids saw every day in study hall and her substitute teaching classrooms.

"If you ever talk to students that know me, they’ll tell you — that’s the glare," she said.

In addition to her past role as a study hall monitor, Kasik, better known as Ms. K at the high school, is a widely recognized community fixture, as she is seen at nearly every Blue Dukes football game and on stage during The Bay Players' community theater performances.

While Kasik has landed other commercial gigs in her 40 years of acting, this is the first time she has actually seen herself on television. Since the ad aired, several people have caught on to her secret television stardom.

Despite Kasik's unmistakable glare, the Bears get-up led even her closest friends to do a double-take when they saw the ad.

"Someone said to me, 'Gerry, I didn’t know you were a Bears fan,'" she said. “I looked at them and said ‘Now, do I look like a Bears fan to you?'"

On the contrary. Kasik said she has been a Packers fan ever since she was a little girl, and she still remembers her first Packers game in the early 1960s at a Bishop’s Charities Game in Milwaukee.

As for sharing a film set with the reigning Super Bowl MVP, Kasik said she was not sure whether Rodgers would be friendly to a non-celebrity when the cameras were off. When there was a break in filming, Kasik tested the waters and said they share a mutual friendship with attorney David Gruber. Kasik knows his family through the high school, and Rodgers has appeared with him in recent television advertisements.

Kasik said they hit it off from there, and the quarterback was very down to earth, despite the stardom.

With a little airtime, Kasik's glare will also get a little more exposure. The glare was already familiar to some of the former Whitefish Bay students on the film set, who ran over to give her a hug and talk. Kasik said her signature scowl was enough to stick with one of the students after all these years.

“Oh my gosh. That’s her," Kasik recalled the student saying. "She could kill you with that look.”