The actor Tim Curry died on Tuesday. He was 80. He was as purely and consistently fun a screen presence as anyone else I can think of, a cartoon of a performer, with outrageous charisma and the ability to communicate it through a wild assortment of constraints: obscuring makeup, heavy prosthetics, voice acting, shitty scripts, amateurish productions, small roles. When Tim Curry was in something, it had at least one delightful and magnetic thing in it.
Curry most famously portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, after having substantially created the character in Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show stage production. It's tempting to call this his breakout role—it's incredibly famous now, and it was his debut film performance—but Rocky Horror wasn't a hit on its initial release, and nearly a decade elapsed before Curry landed anything like a starring screen role again. Later, among a ton of other credits, he played Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It; and Wadsworth the butler, roughly 90 percent of what makes 1985's Clue worth watching; and Long John Silver in 1996's Muppet Treasure Island, a performance that earned him honorary Muppethood. Among a crazy number of stage credits, he portrayed Mozart when the play Amadeus came to Broadway and received a Tony nomination for it. But Frank-N-Furter will always be the role with which he is most closely associated.
Curry's performance in Rocky Horror is astounding. He is by miles the funniest thing in a movie that also includes O'Brien's singing and dancing as Riff Raff during the "Time Warp" sequence, which sends me into convulsions even now that I've seen it probably close to 15 times. He is by miles the sexiest thing in a movie that features an all but totally undressed Susan Sarandon begging a fully lubed-up Peter Hinwood to fuck her. He is by far the most energetic and unhinged musical performer in a movie that features Meat Loaf with brain-surgery stitches around his forehead screaming the phrase "Hot patootie!" roughly 200 times while driving a motorcycle in a circle. You cannot take your eyes off of him during any moment he is on the screen. It rightly, if belatedly, made Curry a legend.
Hey, speaking of legends! It is Reds Week here at Defector. And it just so happens that Curry also gave an incredible performance as a gigantic red guy in Legend (1985), Ridley Scott's infamous mess of an epic-fantasy production that nonetheless whips huge amounts of ass so long as you can get past all the ways that it also and nearly equally sucks shit.
Very young Tom Cruise and Mia Sara are Legend's nominal leads, playing beskirted forest lad Jack and mischievous princess Lili, respectively, and they're very cute and earnest in roles that demand basically nothing else. Both enjoy tons more screen time than Curry, who plays the villain, Darkness (the incarnation of the name, basically the devil), a performance that required him to submit to nearly six hours of makeup and prosthetic application, covering his entire body, for each day of his involvement in the production, at the end of which he had to soak in a bath for an hour just to dissolve the adhesives affixing that shit to his skin, so that it could then be removed.
Tim Curry was not a large or physically imposing man. In fact, if anything, he was on the small side, reportedly a hair under 5-foot-8 and never brawny. In Legend he plays What If Arnold Schwarzenegger Was The Minotaur And The Minotaur Was Satan: a giant, shredded, horned demon, with goat ears and cat eyes and shoulders a mile wide and a chin you could stab someone in the heart with (and hooves, though Curry didn't ever have to portray that part), who also has to be believable as evil's embodiment in the physical world and the lord of all evil things. This would have been difficult enough even if Curry hadn't had to wear a gigantic prosthetic horns apparatus that made it impossible for him to rotate his head. It is to Scott's enormous credit that he cast Curry in the first place, recognizing that height and muscles can be faked; the role's principal requirements were a communicative face, a cool voice, and above all else blinding charisma. He could not have chosen better.
With apologies to the immortal Robert Picardo as the astoundingly terrifying bog witch Meg Mucklebones—in a single short scene all but totally cut for Legend's shitty theatrical release but restored to glory in a later director's cut—Curry fully steals Legend, even though Darkness is only on the screen for a tiny fraction of its runtime. There were practical reasons to keep him off the screen. For one thing, all the prosthetics severely hindered what he could do and therefore what Darkness could be portrayed doing (and in some shots during the climactic action scene, it is impossible to miss that the character is being portrayed by a stuntman in a totally immobile rubber mask). For another, at one point during the production Curry had an episode of claustrophobic panic while waiting for the prosthetics to be removed and tried to tear them off, and ripped his own skin badly enough to sideline him for a week. As a story device, too, it works the way keeping the shark largely off-screen worked in Jaws, building anticipation for his every appearance and charging those scenes with electricity.
But what makes Darkness work is Curry, who plays him a bit bratty and self-pitying, with thin skin and a fragile ego, but also believably seductive and at all times dangerous and frightening. When he's not on the screen, you're impatient for him to come back; when he's on the screen, you're a little scared to look at him.
Curry concludes the proceedings with a great villain speech about how he can't ever be truly destroyed, because darkness is what gives definition to light, and as such is "a part of you all." His performance in the scene is great: Darkness knows he's telling the truth, and seems almost to welcome what he knows will be a false defeat. It's a perfect setup for what happens next, when he is vanquished—and proven right, by everyone in the audience immediately experiencing a moment of thinking Shit, I want him back.
