Actor Tim Curry has a long and varied career that began on stage in the late 1960s. Throughout the early 1970s, he ate up the London theater scene, appearing in productions of “Titus Andronicus,” “The White Devil,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (he played Puck). He had met playwright and songwriter Richard O’Brien back when they both appeared in the London production of “Hair” in 1968, and O’Brien would go on to cast Curry in his queer, cross-dressing musical “The Rocky Horror Show” in 1973. Curry played the wicked Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a gender-bending, cross-dressing hedonist who made villainy look fun. He would reprise the role for the 1975 film adaptation “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
From there, Curry seemingly discovered that he had a talent for playing villains and heavies. In his decades-long career thereafter, Curry played the con man Rooster in “Annie,” the demonic Darkness in Ridley Scott’s “Legend,” the murderous clown Pennywise in “It,” Long John Silver in “Muppet Treasure Island,” and numerous other assorted jerks, killers, and kooks. He voiced monsters and villains in animated productions like “FernGully: The Last Rainforest,” “Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas,” and even in Barbie and Scooby-Doo movies. His villain roles are plentiful and varied.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Curry, 79, talked about his career and his habit of playing heavies, and why both he and audiences found wicked characters so appealing. Curry noted that most everyone can, on some level, relate to a villain. At the very least, most audiences are drawn to extremes. Curry’s particular talent, however, came from his habit of making villainous characters funny, appealing, or amusing in some way. That, he said, gave him the edge.
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Tim Curry always tries to make his villains amusing
Pennywise cackling and holding balloons in It – ABC
Like any great actor, Tim Curry feels that empathy is key. No matter how terrible a villain an actor may be playing, they will have to find relatable emptions in them. Curry has played sadists and literal supernatural monsters, but understands that, as an actor, he has to fundamentally understand them. It was a quality, he said, he inherited from his father. In Curry’s words:
“I’ve always tried to make [villains] amusing, which gives them a bit more edge. […] It’s like people being drawn to the scene of a car crash. They’re drawn to extreme behavior … I think people secretly long to be a bit more explosive or act out much more.”
One might hear many actors say that playing villains is fun, as it allows them to shed their inhibitions and take revel in (pretend) acts of evil. Villains, generally speaking, enjoy themselves. That’s certainly true of the villains that Curry plays; he allows all his characters to smirk, cackle, and howl out their evil into the world. Some might even see a character like Dr. Frank-N-Furter to be aspirational. Well, not the murder and cannibalism parts, but his freewheeling sexual hedonism.
Even in kid-friendly entertainments, Curry could cut loose, snarling his villain lines at Barbie or at Kermit the Frog with equal aplomb. In “Muppet Treasure Island,” he embodies Long Jon Silver perfectly. He played Ebenezer Scrooge in a 2001 production of “A Christmas Carol,” and captured Scrooge’s embittered miserliness with aplomb. And these are just his villain roles. Curry has played plenty of dramatic and comedic roles besides.
Tim Curry had to teach himself to drop out of character after playing villains
Long John Silver surrounded by human and Muppet pirates in Muppet Treasure Island – Buena Vista Pictures
Curry found that he prefers to sink into roles, falling deep into character during a film shoot or a day on stage. He therefore had to teach himself to leave all his evil characteristics on stage and drop out of character quickly once his shift was over. If he didn’t, he’d take the character home, and that wasn’t healthy. He found that he experienced a great deal of personal relief in overplaying nasty characters, as they allowed him to channel any personal dark impulses he may have had. Curry, of course, wasn’t drawn to cannibalism, but playing a sociopath surely allowed him a therapuetic outlet for any anger or depression he might experience. As he put it:
“Eventually I got better and better at it, because I had to have a life. You’ve got to dump it somewhere. When you’ve been acting as a character for a whole day, it’s quite difficult to shake them off. Particularly if you throw yourself completely into it, which I tried to do.”
Curry hasn’t acted much since his stroke in 2012, which resulted in loss of mobility in one of his arms and one of his legs. He remains sharp as a tack at fan conventions, however, and has appeared in the documentaries “Pennywise: The Story of It” and “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror,” which deeply explore two of his most celebrated performances. He still performs voice roles from time to time as well, appearing in “Over the Garden Wall” and “Ben 10.” He is deeply beloved, gloriously peculiar, and deeply beloved by queer kids everywhere.
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