Alan Cumming played filmmaker Piers Cuthbertson-Smyth in the 1997 movie “Spice World” starring girl pop icons the Spice Girls. It’s a role that Cumming said he got after Geri Halliwell — aka Ginger Spice — saw him on stage playing the lead character in “Hamlet.”
Cumming told People, “The reason that they asked me to be in their film was that Geri, when she was at college, her class came to see me playing Hamlet just a couple of days after her dad died.”
“And, of course, Hamlet is a character whose dad has just died and was in grief for that,” Cumming continued. “She really connected with me because of my Hamlet. And that was why they asked me to be in the ‘Spice Girls’ film.”
Cumming said that he had a lot of fun while filming the movie. “I learned the Spice Girls’ dance moves from the Spice Girls in between takes. I remember having this crash coach in the Spice Girls and just loving them and their spirit. We laughed all summer. I had a really great time and made really good friends.”
In fact, Cumming remains friends with each of the Spice Girls today. “I bump into them quite a lot and it’s always so lovely,” he added. “I see Geri a lot.”
In retrospect, he said, he was able to work with the group during their professional peak. “It was like they were really delicious, ripe fruit. And shortly after that they went a bit rotting. So I kind of caught them at their prime.”
The 1997 movie was a major cultural moment for fans of the band. Halliwell was joined by her groupmates Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham (then Adams), Melanie “Sporty Spice” Chisholm and Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown for the 93-minute romp, inspired in part by the Beatles’ movie “A Hard Day’s Night.”
“Spice World” still has a hold on audiences decades later. In January 2023, Spin Magazine’s Nicholas Bell argued that when it comes to critics who derided the movie after its release, “the joke’s on the naysayers, including Mr. Ebert, who arguably wasn’t qualified enough to look past his pretensions to divorce his disdain for their music from the purposeful (and at least semi-successful) frippery of escapist fan fiction.”
