Studio Note #43: There Is No Halfway to Transylvania.
In all of Curry’s performances, the face changed, dramatically. The commitment never did.
Tim Curry built a career out of the kinds of choices that usually don't result in a career like Tim Curry's.
He played a sexually liberated mad scientist in heels. A demonic clown that permanently fucked up an entire generation of children. A gigantic red devil with horns that would make a Texas longhorn jealous. A frantic butler trying to explain several murders at once. And somehow, even when he was playing the concierge in Home Alone 2, he made an impression.
Somehow, he made every one of them completely believable.
Not because he played them straight, but because he committed.
Curry never seemed embarrassed by what he was doing. There was never that little wink to the audience that said, I know this is ridiculous too. If the character called for theatrical, he went theatrical. If it called for sinister, he was terrifying. If it called for completely unhinged, there was apparently no ceiling.
Frank-N-Furter could have been a joke. In a lot of actors' hands, he probably would have been. Instead, Curry committed so completely to the character that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is still playing in theaters more than 50 years later.
That's something I think about a lot in creative work.
Interesting ideas rarely get killed outright. They get compromised to death.
Someone comes up with something strange, funny, provocative or just different enough to make everyone in the room slightly uncomfortable. Then the sanding begins.
Maybe we tone this down.
Maybe we make that a little more approachable.
Maybe people won't get it.
By the time everyone feels comfortable, the thing that made the idea interesting in the first place is gone.
You end up with something that isn't weird enough to be memorable and isn't conventional enough to have the confidence of simplicity. It's just somewhere in the middle.
Tim Curry never seemed particularly interested in the middle.
After suffering a major stroke in 2012, the way he could perform changed dramatically. But he continued working, particularly as a voice actor, and continued making appearances. It would have been understandable for that to be the end of an extraordinary career. It wasn't.
There is probably a larger lesson somewhere in all of that about resilience, longevity and adapting when circumstances force you to.
But today, I'm more interested in the simpler one.
If you're going to do something, fucking do it.
Commit to the idea. Commit to the weird thing that made everyone a little nervous when you first suggested it.
You can always make something smaller later.
It's considerably harder to make something unforgettable after you've sanded off everything that made it interesting.
Rest in peace, Tim Curry.
Thanks for keeping it a buck.