7 Tim Curry Roles You Have Definitely Never Heard About

Actor Tim Curry performs a scene from — Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

You likely know Tim Curry from his many, many iconic roles: as the star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Clue, the original It miniseries, the Broadway production of Spamalot, or maybe even Muppet Treasure Island. But the Emmy and Grammy winner has hundreds of performances to his name, and we bet you haven’t seen or even heard of some of the ones below. As we celebrated the actor’s 79th birthday on April 19, here are some truly deep cuts from Curry’s career in film, TV, theater, video games, and even theme park attractions.

1 Extraterrorestrial Alien Encounter

In this scary attraction, which haunted Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom from 1994 to 2003, Curry voiced the robot SIR — short for Simulated Intelligence Robotics — who introduced the teleportation technology that would later bring guests face to face with an extraterrestrial.

Phil Hartman voiced SIR’s predecessor, the robot TOM 2000, but Curry “took that same figure, [made a] few modifications, made it a little more sinister, and voiced it, did a fabulous job, and made it a terrific character,” show writer Dan Molitor said on The Tiara Talk Show in 2018.

2 Titanic

No, not that Titanic. A year before James Cameron’s blockbuster, Curry appeared in a 1996 CBS miniseries that also depicted the 1912 sinking of the “unsinkable” ocean liner. Joining a cast that included Peter Gallagher, George C. Scott, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Curry played Simon Doonan, a fictional (and villainous, of course) steward aboard the ship.

Unfortunately, the film didn’t wow critics, with The New York Times’ Caryn James calling it “a silly four-hour miniseries [that] follows the trite conventions of the disaster genre with a total lack of imagination.”

3 Over the Top

This short-lived 1997 ABC sitcom had Curry playing Simon Ferguson, an actor who moves in with his ex-wife (Annie Potts) at her New York City hotel after getting the boot from a soap opera. Though the show — Curry’s first US TV series — filmed 11 episodes, only three ever made it to air, but the show does have one remarkable credit: it co-starred a pre-Office Steve Carrell.

On Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, Curry said costar Annie Potts helped him acclimate to sitcom filming. “The four cameras — I don’t know what’s going on,” he quipped. “One camera I know how to deal with. And she’s always saying, ‘It’s over there. It’s that one. It’s B.’ Literally while we’re shooting sometimes!”

4 Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas

In this direct-to-video sequel to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Curry lent his voice to the villain of the story, an evil pipe organ named Forte.

“He was the court composer, and it’s actually my chance to play Salieri really” Curry said on Live, referencing his past opponent in the Broadway play Amadeus. “He’s a pretty mean customer. Unlike the rest of the characters, he’s really pleased not to be human anymore.”

5 A Series of Unfortunate Events

Curry earned a Grammy nomination for his work narrating the first of Lemony Snicket’s books in 2001, and he ended up narrating most of the series’ audiobooks, except for the ones read by Snicket himself, a.k.a. author Daniel Handler. In an interview with AudioFile Magazine, Handler said Curry did a “very splendid job,” and he was happy to turn the “unbelievably arduous” narration process back to the actor.

“Curry’s recordings of the Series of Unfortunate Events are sublime,” added Salon’s Laura Miller, “the perfect marriage of material and performer and the only audiobook I’ve heard that manages to improve creatively on the print version.”

6 A Christmas Carol

In 2001, Curry played Ebenezer Scrooge in this musical, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novella of the same name, at New York City’s Theater at Madison Square Garden. He also gave Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade viewers a preview of his role as the miser-turned-good guy.

Ebenezer marked Curry’s first stage role in nearly a decade, and the actor said in his official online bio that he had nerves before the first performance. “The theatre there has 5,000 seats, and I was dreading it,” he explained. “But I remember going out on stage at the beginning of the technical rehearsals and thinking, ‘You idiot, this is what you do.’”

7 Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3

Curry became a meme fave for his role as Russian Premier Anatoly Cherdenko in this 2008 real-time strategy video game, thanks to his line reading about leaving Earth for “the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism… space!”

“Tim Curry is the master of camp and the master of menace and in the clip we finally witness something that is finally too ridiculous, finally too outré, finally too much even for him,” critic Anthony Oliveira told Vice in 2022.