iPhone 5 commercial casting call takes rumour bizarreness to new level

Apple is close to filming a commercial for the iPhone 5, according to a casting advert briefly posted on Craigslist. Another week brings yet another odd rumour and we didn't want you to miss out on the fun.

The advert, supposedly posted by casting director H Golan, called for five "happy, smiling" people from a "range of ethnicities, ages and sexes" in order to shoot an "iPhone 5 commercial," MacRumors reports.

Bizarrely, the ad gives two identical examples of the type of person they're looking for, leading to the Internet Movie Database page for a rather obscure actor. That, coupled with an overuse of exclamation marks and a rate quoted in pounds sterling has led many people to cry "fake!" -- and we'd tend to agree.

Quite apart from the fact that, if this were genuine, the director must have broken an NDA in posting the ad, this isn't the way successful casting companies look for talent. Craigslist? Really?

Whether Apple's next phone will be the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S, the frenzy around it is immense. Naturally, we're not adding to it in any way, shape or form by reporting this entirely spurious nonsense.

Last week, several British and Australian publications suggested their local Apple PR departments were desperately trying to get them to go to next week's WWDC in order to see the unveiling of a mystery product. Apple has now confirmed that Steve Jobs will be showing off Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 at the keynote on 6 June. While we can't rule out new hardware as well, it seems unlikely.

As for Apple product ads, surely Steve Jobs has a mandate that all actors should look like this, and definitely not like this.