Most professional footballers expect to achieve the biggest celebrity status at home. They are lionized by adults for scoring last-minute winners and seen as superheroes by children for simply signing an autograph.
But this might not be the case for Ipswich Town defender Jordan Spence. While he is tackling injustices at Portman Road and saving the Blues from a world-ending relegation, his wife has been busy battling a gold-eating 65 million-year-old alien.
His wife, London-born 23-year-old actress Naomi Scott, plays the role of Kimberly Hart – the ‘Pink Power Ranger’ – in the new Power Rangers movie, which was released worldwide in late March.
Spence, a former West Ham United player and England youth international, was a free signing for the Blues in January. The 26-year-old had been without a club since last summer.
He has joked in a previous interview with this newspaper: “Normally it’s the actresses that are out of work, not the footballer!
“She’s working on a few things and hopefully you’ll see a bit more of her this year. Hopefully we get some family success this year.”
The right-back has made 11 appearances for Town so far, and started as a wing-back in last night’s 3-0 win over Wigan.
Spence and Scott tied the knot in London in June 2014.
In a promotional interview with Jimmy Kimmel last month, the American chat show host asked Scott about her husband.
She said: “He plays for a football team called Ipswich Town, and I feel I was kind of representing him the other day because we had to throw the first pitch, but it was like the three Power Rangers who weren’t American: it was the Aussie, the Chinese and the English. I walked out and some guy who was trying to be sweet was saying ‘you’ll be fine, it’s really cute’. I said ‘what’s cute?’ And he said ‘you know, when girls throw, they throw underarm’, and I was like ‘listen up, I’m going to throw it overarm, and get it to the (catcher).”
The $110m budget film is an adaptation of the favourite children’s show and has earned $95m worldwide at the box office.
Scott plays one of the five next-generation Power Rangers; a ragtag group of authority-flouting teenagers trying to thwart the diabolical sorceress Rita Repulsa.
She has previously been cast in Disney Channel’s film Lemonade Mouth in 2011 and The Martian with Matt Damon in 2015.
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