While Tim Curry will be most widely recalled for The Rocky Horror Show, a generation of younger fans know him better for his role as the diabolical dictator Anatoly Cherdenko, the premier of the Soviet Union, in the time-bending and cheerfully absurd cold war pastiche Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008). Gleefully capering with ’Allo ’Allo antics in this real-time strategy video game, Curry struggled to hold back his own laughter in several scenes.
To some such corpsing might be considered bad acting, but in context it only improves the performance, as a joke shared is multiplied, and everyone is in on the light-hearted fun, even the cast. In particular his declaration that “I am escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism... SPACE!” is so bombastic that its pantomimic flair never fails.
