Evil Tim Curry

Tim Curry has the perfect voice for evil. The other day, someone in my family posed the question of whether he ever plays anything except the villain. It seemed like a joke at first, but when I looked him up on IMDB, I was aghast at his resume.

If you’re not familiar with IMDB.com, it’s the database of all movies, tv shows, actors, writers, etc., etc. It’s amazing. I keep an app on my phone to settle arguments.

Everyone knows Tim Curry best as Frank Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show, the funnest cross-dressing villain ever. And in Clue, his butler Wadsworth kills Mr. Body. (True, it’s only in one of the endings, but it’s the one that counts.)

Now check out the rest of this bizarre filmography:

• Rooster Hannigan in Annie – the guy kidnapped an orphan, for Pete’s Sake!
• Hexxus in Fern Gully, the cloud monster who teaches us about the evils of pollution … and who single-handedly kept my daughter from sleeping in her own bed for an entire summer!
• Pennywise, the evil clown in IT
• In Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he played … wait for it … Satan. Yup, of all the bad guys there he had to out-evil them all.
• Cardinal Richlieu in The Three Musketeers
• Captain Hook in Peter Pan (TV series)
• Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island (part of his evil pirate phase)
• Chancellor Palpatine in the Clone Wars series
• Gomez Adams in Adams Family Reunion. I include this as a villain only because nobody but Raul Julia should ever play Gomez.
• Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (animated version)
• Forte, the possessed grand piano in the straight-to-video Beauty and the Beast II. Did I mention the summer my kid stopped sleeping in her own bed? Yeah, well this is what scared the crap out of her the very month she finally went back to her room. Tim Curry owes me a full 6 months of sleep!
• George Herbert Walker “King” Chicken in the Duckman TV show. I don’t even know what to do with that.
• Count Nefarious in a video game called Toonstruck. It’s hardly worth mentioning since nobody has ever heard of that game, but come on – Count Nefarious? How great of an evil name is that?
• Another truly amazing evil name: Slagar the Cruel in A Tale of Redwall
• Neville Baddington in Saving Santa
• Then they get lazy. In Gary & Mike, his character was just called Killer. Kind of gives it away, huh?
• In Once Upon a Christmas Village, he was Sir Evil. This one merits a forehead slap.
• Reverend Whoopsie in What About Dick? Now, having never seen this, I cannot definitively say that this is a villain, but I think we can all agree that there’s nothing good coming from a character named Rev. Whoopsie.
• Rounding this all out are a series of Scooby-Doo villains from The Goblin King to Mastermind.

In the entire 50-year span of his career, I could only find one character who was truly good and wholesome. Nigel from the old Nickelodeon cartoon, The Wild Thornberries. That’s a pretty darn good one, though. It almost redeems him for all the others.

Well, except for Forte. That one should have never existed. (shudder)