Nobody Did It Quite Like Tim Curry
Six Tim Curry movies and shows on Tubi celebrating his unforgettable work across horror, comedy, fantasy, and voice acting.
Some actors disappear into a role. Tim Curry could disappear into one and still make you think, of course nobody else could have played that. The voice. The raised eyebrow. That wicked little smile that could mean you were about to laugh, die, or possibly both. Give him fishnets, a clown suit, a wizard's robe, a pirate ship, or even a cloud of toxic pollution and Curry never treated the assignment like it was beneath him. If anything, the stranger the assignment got, the more at home he seemed.
Curry’s death at 80 leaves generations of fans remembering very different versions of the same extraordinary performer. Maybe your Curry was Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Maybe he was Wadsworth in Clue, breathlessly explaining absolutely everything. Maybe Tim Curry's Pennywise in IT made you reconsider clowns entirely. Tim Curry had range, but more importantly, Tim Curry had presence.
Rather than trying to fit a career this gloriously strange into one box, we're celebrating how often Curry gleefully escaped them. These six Tim Curry movies and shows on Tubi move through horror, comedy, fantasy, animation, and cult cinema, with each one revealing something different about the performer behind all those unforgettable characters.
Pennywise: The Story of IT
A red balloon. A storm drain. That smile. Long before another Pennywise danced his way onto movie screens, Tim Curry's Pennywise turned Stephen King's clown into nightmare fuel with little more than makeup, sharp teeth, and an unnervingly cheerful delivery. Pennywise: The Story of IT revisits the making and legacy of the 1990 IT miniseries, bringing together its cast and crew, including Curry himself, to look back at the adaptation that made an entire generation considerably less comfortable around clowns.
What made Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise so unsettling was that he could be genuinely funny right up until he wasn't. He played the clown part of the killer clown, teasing and performing with that unmistakable Curry mischief before letting something much uglier peek through.
Scary Movie 2
Professor Oldman really should know better than to bring a group of college students into a haunted mansion. Then again, common sense would make Scary Movie 2 considerably shorter. Tim Curry plays Professor Oldman, arriving at Hell House with the authority of a man conducting a serious paranormal experiment while the movie around him is busy being aggressively, proudly ridiculous.
And that was one of Curry's great gifts: he understood camp. He didn't stand outside the joke and point at how silly everything was. He walked straight into the silliness, delivered the material with total conviction and somehow made it funnier. Anyone who watched him commit completely to Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show already knew the rule: Tim Curry was never afraid of going big.
The Secret of Moonacre
You know that moment when a fantasy villain enters and, before anyone explains anything, you think, Well, he's clearly going to be a problem? Tim Curry practically specialized in it. The Secret of Moonacre gives him Coeur De Noir, leader of the De Noir clan, and one half of the ancient feud young Maria Merryweather finds herself trying to unravel.
Curry could make villainy feel like an art form because he rarely settled for simply being threatening. Coeur gets the commanding voice, carefully measured expressions, and unmistakable sense that Curry is enjoying every sinister inch of the character. It's the kind of performance that explains why Tim Curry became so closely associated with deliciously theatrical villains.
FernGully: The Last Rainforest
If you didn't know Tim Curry voiced Hexxus, prepare for one of those “wait, THAT'S HIM?” moments. FernGully: The Last Rainforest casts Curry as an ancient force of destruction unleashed upon the rainforest, a pollution-loving mass of smoke and sludge who should not be remotely charismatic.
Curry apparently did not receive that memo. Hexxus slithers through the movie with a voice that's smooth, theatrical, funny, and threatening all at once, especially when Curry gets to sing. It's also a perfect gateway into Tim Curry's extensive voice-acting career, something people sometimes overlook. From Hexxus to Nigel Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys and countless other animated characters, Curry could steal a scene without showing his face at all. That voice was more than enough.
The Colour of Magic
Terry Pratchett created a fantasy universe that was clever, absurd, sprawling, and deeply committed to its own weirdness. Naturally, Tim Curry fit right in. The Colour of Magic casts him as Trymon, an ambitious wizard whose pursuit of power puts him amid the increasingly bizarre events unfolding across Pratchett's Discworld.
Trymon lets Curry do something he was particularly good at: play the character completely straight while everything around him gets wonderfully strange. He doesn't need to remind you that Discworld is ridiculous. Curry knows the robes, magic, and murderous ambition are already doing plenty. That confidence is exactly why fantasy roles suited Tim Curry so well. Give the man an elaborate costume and sinister motivation, then let him cook.
Times Square
Before Pennywise haunted storm drains and Wadsworth sprinted through Hill House explaining who killed whom, Times Square gave Curry a microphone. He plays Johnny LaGuardia, a late-night New York radio DJ whose broadcasts become intertwined with two teenage runaways turning themselves into underground punk-rock sensations.
There's no elaborate villainy to hide behind here, which makes Johnny such an interesting reminder of Tim Curry's range as an actor. The voice becomes intimate instead of menacing, his charisma becomes cool rather than theatrical, and he lets the young women at the center of the story remain exactly where they belong. For all the roles where Tim Curry gloriously took over the room, he also knew when the best performance was knowing precisely how much of it to occupy.
