Maybe Tim Curry's Greatest Character Was Tim Curry

What the hell was it about Tim Curry?

Seriously.

He was delightfully weird. Off-color. Charismatic. Intense. Completely intentional. He could be hysterically funny and vaguely threatening at exactly the same time.

And then there was the sexuality.

Not conventional movie-star sexuality. Not even something particularly easy to describe. Curry possessed his own strange brand of it—an undercurrent of dangerous sensuality that could make charm feel just a little illicit and menace seem considerably more interesting than it had any right to be.

There was simply nobody quite like him.

Say the name Tim Curry and, depending on who you're talking to, an entirely different character may appear.

Maybe it's Dr. Frank-N-Furter, descending that elevator in pearls, fishnets and enough confidence to power the entire castle in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Maybe it's Pennywise, smiling menacingly beneath the clown makeup in the 1990 television adaptation of Stephen King's It.

Maybe it's Wadsworth, the increasingly unhinged butler in Clue, eventually explaining an entire evening of murder while tearing through a mansion like a man being paid by the room.

Darkness in Legend. Rooster Hannigan in Annie. Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. Even the suspicious Plaza concierge who made the grave mistake of getting between Kevin McCallister and his room service in Home Alone 2.

None of these people should have anything in common.

Except they do.

Tim Curry.

That's the thing.

We're accustomed to praising great actors for disappearing into their characters.

I'm not entirely convinced Curry did.

Oh, he transformed. Sometimes spectacularly. He changed his voice, his body, his mannerisms and occasionally buried himself beneath enough prosthetics and makeup to render the original man almost invisible.

But something always survived the transformation.

Something wonderfully, unmistakably Curry.

The wit.

The danger.

The intelligence.

The theatricality.

The mischief.

That slightly wicked expression suggesting he knew something you didn't—and might be having far too much fun deciding whether to tell you.

Tim Curry died this week at his Los Angeles home at 80, after a career that stretched across film, television, theater, music and voice acting.

There will be plenty written about what he did.

But maybe the more interesting question is what exactly he brought to it.

Because Tim Curry didn't simply create memorable characters.

Somehow, he made wildly different characters unmistakably his.

And figuring out how he did that means starting with the character that changed everything.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

And Frank, like Curry himself, did not believe in entering a room quietly.

Frank Believed in Frank

It would be easy to call Frank-N-Furter camp.

Tim Curry would object.

When other actors asked his advice about playing Frank, Curry told them essentially the opposite: don't play the camp. Frank wasn't in on the joke. He was powerful, sexually voracious and completely convinced of his own ability to have anybody he wanted.

That distinction matters.

Because watch Curry in Rocky Horror and you'll see something much more interesting than an actor having fun in fishnets.

Frank believed in Frank. And there was nothing cheap about this transvestite.

The corset isn't the joke. The heels aren't the joke. His sexuality certainly isn't the joke.

Frank walks into that world as though everyone else has been waiting for him to arrive.

And Curry knew exactly what he was doing.

Looking back on the character decades later, he said sexual danger and power were deliberately built into Frank. When the stage production became a movie, Curry realized that playing to an audience and playing to a lens were different propositions.

His solution?

He had to “seduce the camera.”

Of course he did.

Curry said he approached the camera aggressively and made damn sure it noticed him.

It noticed.

So did everybody else.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show initially went nowhere near becoming the phenomenon we now know. Then came the midnight screenings. The callbacks. The costumes. The shadow casts. The generations of people doing the Time Warp who hadn't even been born when Curry first put on the heels.

Frank-N-Furter became a cultural creature unto himself.

But Curry didn't spend the rest of his career trying to recreate him.

That would have been far too easy.

Risky Was Better

There's a story about Curry's original audition for The Rocky Horror Show that tells you quite a bit about the man.

He showed up in boots he'd spray-painted silver and launched into Little Richard's “Tutti Frutti,” throwing himself around with such abandon that, as Curry later recalled, nobody else had approached the audition quite the same way.

He got the part.

Years later, Curry acknowledged that playing an overtly sexual, androgynous, cross-dressing mad scientist in the early 1970s was a risk.

That was part of the attraction.

“I would choose risky over anything.”

That philosophy may be one of the better explanations for his career.

Safe would have ruined Frank-N-Furter.

Safe would have made Pennywise merely scary.

Safe would have made Wadsworth merely a butler.

And Tim Curry apparently had very little interest in merely being anything.

He liked what he once called the more curious corners of human behavior.

So he went looking for them.

Funny Makes Dangerous Better

Curry also understood something delicious about villains:

They're more interesting when they're funny.

He played plenty of them, and he once explained that he deliberately tried to make his villains amusing because humor gave them more edge.

That sounds backwards until you think about Pennywise.

Or Darkness.

Or virtually any Tim Curry character who has ever smiled at someone who probably should have started running several minutes earlier.

Curry understood that audiences can enjoy being unsettled.

Maybe we enjoy it even more when the person unsettling us seems to be having a marvelous time.

There was often pleasure in Curry's menace.

And menace in his pleasure.

That combination is part of what made his particular brand of sexuality so unusual, too. He didn't need to be playing a conventionally sexual character for that current to be somewhere underneath the performance.

Charm could become threat.

Threat could become funny.

Funny could suddenly become sexy.

Sexy could become dangerous.

And somehow Curry could move among all four without changing lanes.

No wonder we kept watching.

He Went All the Way There

Curry once explained that after spending an entire day inside a character, he sometimes found it difficult to shake the character off—particularly because he tried to throw himself completely into the role.

That tracks.

There is very little half-assed Tim Curry on film.

Even when the movie around him is enormous, ridiculous, fantastical or deliberately over-the-top, Curry doesn't seem embarrassed by it.

That's important.

Actors can kill strange material by signaling to the audience that they know it's strange.

Curry committed.

You were going to look at him.

Maybe that's what Curry understood better than most.

You don't make an outrageous character believable by making the character less outrageous.

You make the character believable by believing in him on a cellular level.

Maybe That Was It

Which brings us back to the question.

What the hell was it about Tim Curry?

Maybe it was the voice.

Certainly didn't hurt.

Maybe it was those eyes, capable of suggesting amusement, contempt and impending trouble within roughly the same three seconds.

Maybe it was the theatrical training.

The intelligence.

The physicality.

The humor.

The willingness to take a risk and then take another one.

Maybe it was that dangerous sensuality.

Maybe it was simply that Curry seemed incapable of being ordinary on screen.

But I suspect it was something harder to separate into parts.

There was a one-offness about Tim Curry.

You couldn't quite identify what he reminded you of because, eventually, the answer was just Tim Curry.

He was his own reference point.

That's rare.

Curry died with three Tony nominations, a Daytime Emmy, a staggering list of voice credits and a career spanning nearly six decades.

Those are the facts.

They still don't explain him.

Maybe we never really knew Tim Curry. He was far too private to pretend that we did.

But we knew when Tim Curry showed up.

Whatever face he happened to be wearing.

Whatever voice he happened to be using.

However many pounds of prosthetics happened to be covering him.

Something got through.

Something weird.

Funny.

Sexy.

Dangerous.

A little wicked.

And completely, unmistakably his.

Tim Curry spent nearly six decades creating characters nobody else could have created quite the same way, because the most interesting character he brought to every one of them was the one nobody else could possibly play.

Tim Curry.