During the recent State of Play it was not only revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3 would be released on PS5 and PC in August 2023, developer Larian also used the opportunity to show that it had won over J. K. Simmons (Whiplash, among countless other performances) to play one of the game’s big bad evils – a guy called General Ketheric Thorm.
Apparently, Thorm is an almost invincible necromancer with his own army of undead and has nefarious plans for Baldur’s Gate. His motivations for those plans, the studio said, are quite complex, though, so it brought the Academy Award winner on board to perform the role.
Baldur’s Gate 3, of course, is not J. K. Simmons first role in video games. He’s probably best known in this space for his role as Cave Johnson in Valve’s iconic Portal 2, which he reprised on two later occasions (in Lego Dimensions and Aperture Desk Job).
He also voiced the role he played in the 2000s Spider-Man movies, J. Jonah Johnson, in the games based on those movies – heck, he even voiced the character for a Pinball machine.
But to me, his most memorable role was that of US President Howard T. Ackerman in 2008’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, where he starred alongside an ensemble cast that included Tim Curry, George Takei, Peter Stormare, Jonathan Pryce, and David Hasselhoff.
It’s probably also the cheesiest thing any of these actors has ever been featured in – seriously, Tim Curry is laughing his butt off at half of the lines he has to say. As Ackerman, Simmons is one of the leaders of the Allies, who fight a three-way war against Curry’s Soviet Union and Takei’s Empire of the Rising Sun in this real-time strategy game.
What no one knows, however, is that President Ackerman, who is portrayed as a very stereotypical patriotic American politician, is not an actual human, but a robot sent by the Empire of the Rising Sun to infiltrate the West. At one point in the story George Takei, the Japanese emperor, pulls a keyboard cable out of its socket, which somehow causes Ackerman to malfunction and has Simmons do some hilarious body acting.
In the prelude to the game’s release publisher EA even had Simmons star in fake election campaign ads, in which he talked about stuff like health care and illegal immigration, using the slogan: “Vote for me, if you want to live.”
To summarize: We’re looking forward to seeing him in Baldur’s Gate 3 and if you have never played through the campaign of Red Alert 3 before, then it’s about time.
More must-reads: