The Evolution Championship Series, one of the biggest tournaments in the world of competitive fighting games, is being held in Las Vegas this weekend. The tournament (usually shortened to EVO), is an annual three-day-destination spot for fighting game fans, competitive players, and also apparently actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who tweeted today that she’d spent the afternoon walking the floor of the tournament with her family, cosplaying as a mask-clad Street Fighter character to protect her identity.
That’s Curtis as claw-wielding Spanish cage fighter Vega, a boss character who originally appeared in Street Fighter II, and her husband, writer and director Christopher Guest, as Tekken character Dr. Bosconovitch. (Luckily, 2012’s Street Fighter X Tekken established that characters from the two universes can interact, lest the Curtis-Guest family be torn apart in a storm of errant non-canonicity.) As Curtis discussed in an interview promoting her recent film Spare Parts, the tournament trip was a graduation present for her son, Thomas, who appears in the photo as Street Fighter character Dee Jay.
Curtis has yet to address the elephant in the room: the fact that Vega’s use of claws in a martial arts tournament is total bullshit, even if he was fighting against a magic-limbed yoga master, or a green Brazilian monster man. Still, her incognito appearance at EVO raises the possibility that any faceless cosplayer encountered at a nerd-friendly event might secretly be Jamie Lee Curtis, World’s Coolest Mom. That half-orc wandering in a helmet at DragonCon? Curtis. The yogurt-sipping Stormtrooper hanging out at Celebration? CURTIS. That guy in the Ghostbusters suit, trying to get people to talk to him at Comic-Con? Actually, never mind, that one’s Dan Aykroyd. False alarm, people. Wrong Trading Places star.