Ohio Native Finds Stardom Acting South of the Border

Monday, January 27th, 2003

Playing the foreign “heel” seems entirely too rasslin’ (or lucha libre) to me, but Roger Cudney has made a career out of it. From Ohio Native Finds Stardom Acting South of the Border:

On the recent Mexican soap opera, “Amigas y Rivales” (Friends and Rivals), Mr. Cudney was a racist South Texas rancher who caught a couple of illegal Mexican immigrants trespassing on his property, shortly after the World Trade Center attack. “Git off of my land,” the actor snarled, waving a shotgun. Then, in his distinctively accented Spanish, he ad-libbed: “Thousands of Americans have just died in New York. They shouldn’t let anyone enter my country anymore.”

On the late show or on home video, you can catch Mr. Cudney playing a sadistic American prison warden in “Con Odio en la Piel” (With Hate in the Skin) or a bloodthirsty intelligence operative in “Bano de Sangre” (Blood Bath).

He also shows up on commercials. Not long ago, in a TV ad campaign for the Mexican soft drink Aga, Mr. Cudney appeared as a scowling border patrolman combing the U.S.-Mexico frontier for illegal immigrants.
[...]
In the film, “Karateca Azteca” (Aztec Karate Fighter), Mr. Cudney plays an archaeologist, with a black belt, who turns out to be robbing ancient Mexican treasures. In the climactic scene, Mr. Cudney loses a martial-arts battle to the wimpy Capulina, an outcome that so distressed Mr. Cudney’s nine-year old son that he wouldn’t talk to his father for several days.
Mr. Cudney’s loved ones have had to get used to such humiliations. “I’ve been killed in Mexican films more ways than I can even remember,” he says. The comeuppances can be quite creative. Mr. Cudney’s characters have been smashed by a giant Aztec calendar, dropped down a water well and hurled off the deck of a yacht by a woman.

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