Thrusty Thursday: Steven Brand

As the quality of this image suggests, it's not easy finding photos of Steven Brand. It's actually more effective to Google The Scorpion King, Memnon—Memnon's the name of the baddie he played opposite Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in that hokey-but-fun 2002 movie. This is not for a lack of acting experience, either. A quick trip to Brand's IMDb filmography shows he's been in dozens of films and TV shows. And why not? He's a fox. A Scottish fox.

The other night the manfriend and I were poised to watch a Kung Fu movie, per my predictable request. We realized as it started up that it was nearly three hours long. For thirty-somethings, we are old fogeys, and that would have kept us up way past our bedtimes. We clicked back to the previous screen on Netflix Instant Watcher and lo and behold, the next recommended title was The Scorpion King. I said, "Let's watch it! It'll be fun and cheesy, and it's only ninety minutes long." We sat through thirty-four Jean-Claude Van Damme movies this past winter, so our threshold for cheesy-fun action movies is high. We went for it.

It's a fun movie. I liked it better than The Mummy, let's put it like that. Cinematic cookie dough, not too gorey. But whatever it may have lacked in writing or cleverness, it made up for in Steven Brandfulness. Lookie!

He had a sort of mohawk mullet in this movie, but it totally worked. Though IMDb tells us he's six foot two (and his fan site says five eleven), no one looks huge and manful when plunked beside The Rock's giganticness…but that's okay. I think he's got charisma. He reminded me of another Thrusty Thursday honoree —martial artist John Wayne Parr. For a few delusional moments I imagined Parr had learned to act and to speak in a convincing British accent and scored himself a movie role. But no. At first, sadness. Then delight—two distinct foxes are undoubtedly better than one.

Other random facts I sleuthed out: Brand grew up in eastern Africa, he may have been married to a member of Bananarama at some point (there seems to be a debate going on this point), he once did a bit of miming in Paris, and he plays cricket. Versatile!

Without further ado, here's the trailer for The Scorpion King. Brand gets quite a bit of play in it—see if you can spot his mighty mullhawk!