AVQ&A: Our favorite Tim Curry performances
Honoring the actor who could—and did—do everything.
By Erik Adams, Lacy Baugher Milas, Drew Gillis, William Hughes, Jarrod Jones, Jacob Oller, Dennis Perkins, Matt Schimkowitz; from top left: Disney, Paramount, Westwood Studios, 20th Century Fox
We often like to say that certain performers are so talented that they could do anything or inhabit any role. But here’s the thing: Tim Curry, who died today at age 80, could. And he did. From musicals and cult genre classics to cartoon voicework and TV guest appearances, his unique performance style mixed theatricality and gravitas, making even the smallest of parts uniquely memorable. (Do you know how hard it is to steal a scene from both Carol Burnett and Kermit The Frog?) His range as an actor is so broad that it seems impossible to name just one signature role, but that’s not going to stop The A.V. Club staff from making the case for our favorite Tim Curry performances.
Darkness, Legend
The otherworldly visuals of Legend draw a line between innocence and seduction, and who better to lure Mia Sara (and us eager viewers) across so fraught a threshold than Tim Curry? Handpicked by director Ridley Scott after seeing Curry strut his stuff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry’s casting in the 1985 dark fantasy film makes perfect sense in this context: A vamping Asmodean figure who preens and bellows the virtues of eternal night, cut from a similarly profane cloth as the strutting Dr. Frank-N-Furter, larger, more imposing, and truly the stuff of the best nightmares. “Better be sexual, very sexy, this guy,” Scott said, reflecting on the Lord Of Darkness’s earliest incarnations in the Legend DVD’s supplemental documentary. Given the enormity of Curry’s booming performance, it’s safe to say that Scott and his team nailed what they were seeking in the character with their choice of actor. Shadows and evil rarely have such a sensual, sinister charge as when Curry embodied them. [Jarrod Jones]
Long John Silver, Muppet Treasure Island
While most actors are visibly thrilled to perform alongside the Muppets, few integrate into their world as seamlessly as Tim Curry. No other star could open their mouths so widely that it seemed like maybe they too were a hand puppet. Muppet Treasure Island, in all of its pirate-drag camp, is even more theatrical and broad than most performances put on by Kermit’s band of misfits, which means that Curry—as the scene-stealing Long John Silver—could fully put his West End talents to work. Simultaneously creepy and alluring, dangerous and fatherly, ridiculous and sobering, Curry’s one-legged buccaneer was, like many of his characters, pure oddball charisma. Unlike many of his characters, that allowed him to blend in with the hand-felted chaos around him, even during his showstopping earworm number. If Michael Caine played his Muppet-film Scrooge like he was “working with the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Curry played his Muppet-film Silver like he was also a Muppet. [Jacob Oller]
Wadsworth, Clue
The big multiple-endings gimmick of 1985’s Clue was meant to bring moviegoers back to the theater over and over again—you never knew which solution to the board-game adaptation’s whodunit you were going to get! Box office receipts and anecdotal evidence, however, suggest it was the type of thing better suited to home video, where budding comedy nerds like myself could scrutinize all three screwball conclusions like game tape. To internalize double entendres that would reveal themselves years later. To grasp the importance of each little pause and stammer in Madeline Kahn’s “flames on the side of my face” rant. To bear repeated witness to the sheer force of physicality Tim Curry throws behind his step-by-step explanation of “how it was all done.”
Curry’s great through the entire run of the movie—the picture of urbane dry wit, keen with the script’s abundant wordplay and incredibly sympathetic in his explanation of how he got mixed up in this farcical mess. But it’s Wadsworth the butler’s one-man recap that seals the whole deal, Curry’s breathless summarizing adding some pep to the typical locked-room-mystery denouement while he briefly steals the movie from the battery of beloved character actors being herding about the set. In the wake of his death, we’re all rightfully digging up and passing around evidence of Curry’s versatility. But for my money, there’s no clip that encapsulates his singularity as a capital-P performer like these whirlwind eight-and-a-half minutes. [Erik Adams]
Keep scrolling for more great stories.