A Voice from the Great Unconscious: Tony Todd (1954-2024) | Tributes

Tony Todd was an elegant, six-foot-five, broad shouldered man, graceful and imposing. But he led with his voice. Hear it once, and it would echo in your mind forever. it was magnificent. And he was magnificent.

“Hellllllll-ennnn.” That’s Candyman heralded the title character’s first appearance onscreen in writer-director Bernard Rose’s 1992 sleeper hit, with heroine Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) hearing the hook-handed character’s voice in a dark parking garage, then turning around to see him standing near a concrete railing, unsettlingly looking up rather than at Helen. Todd’s baritone made movie theaters’ subwoofers tremble. It was subterranean, submerged: a voice from the great unconscious.

Todd, who died last week at 69 of cancer, was one of the great contemporary actors specializing in horror and science fiction. Of course, like a lot of actors who end up doing very well in genre work, he didn’t intend for things to go that way. He always told interviewers that his first love was the stage, and he meant it: throughout his life, he usually managed to schedule one stage production every year or two amid all the film and TV work, performing in plays by August Wilson and Shakespeare. Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, he trained at  Artists Collective, Inc., the Eugene O’Neill National Actors Theatre Institute, and Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island, and got a masters’ in acting. His first notable film role was as an infantryman in Oliver Stone’s Platoon at age 33: it was not a big role, but you remembered the voice and the heartbroken eyes.

Soon after that, genre storytelling found him and never let him go. In the same year, 1989, Todd booked a guest role on ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation” as Worf’s brother Kurn and starred in horror makeup master Tom Savini’s remake of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as Ben, the stalwart hero who fends off an army of ghouls only to suffer a crushingly ironic fate (though different from the one that felled Ben in the 1968 original). Both performances debuted the following year. The Romero remake was not a financial or critical success, but his screen presence was undeniably strong both in that and on ‘Star Trek,” and got him into audition rooms that might otherwise have been closed to him.

Then came Candyman and its sequels, a series of such deep pop cultural impact that it owns bathroom mirrors in much the same way that Psycho owns showers and Jaws owns the beach. One of the great 1990s horror movies as well as one of the great Chicago movies, Candyman was shot mainly in and around the Cabrini-Green housing projects (now lost to gentrification). It made racial and class differences central to the gothic tragedy of Daniel Robitaille—the son of a former slave who became an great painter, then was lynched for having an affair with the beautiful daughter of a wealthy white man—and spawned three sequels, the newest of which, 2021’s Candyman (a direct sequel, despite the remake-y title), features Todd’s final performance as Robitaille. The part was so iconic that other filmmakers capitalized on Todd’s “Candyman” fame by casting him in roles that evoked aspects of Robitaille, like Luther “Hook Man” Thompson in Shudder’s “Scream” series, a disturbed Vietnam veteran and child murderer whose weapon of choice is a hook, while the Showtime series “Masters of Horror” cast him as The Beast, a sexually insatiable demon.

In 2000, Todd got a second hit franchise with the “Final Destination” series, playing funeral home owner and mortality sage William Bludworth onscreen in three of the six films (including “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” coming out next year) and doing an audio cameo as the voice of the devil in a theme park ride for “Final Destination 3.” (His catchphrase was, “I’ll see you soon.”) He also became an accomplished member of the Star Trek repertory company, reprising Kurn in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”; playing the adult Jake Sisko in the classic episode “The Visitor”; playing an Alpha Hirogen on ‘Star Trek: Voyager’; and voicing General Rodek in the multiplayer game Star Trek Online. Todd was also the voice of Doom on “The Flash,” Dracula in a 2016 audio adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, and played two voice roles in the “Transformers” franchise (The Fallen in Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and the Decepticon Dreadwing in the Hub Network series “Transformers Prime”). 

With the name recognition Todd accrued from playing Daniel Robataille, William Bludworth, Star Trek parts, and other roles in genre projects, he was able to remain a working actor at a fairly high level for more than three decades. He comfortably supported himself and his family by doing science fiction, horror, and fantasy roles while taking more earthbound parts in indie dramas and averaging one stage production per year, including multiple August Wilson productions: “How I Learned What I Learned” and “Fences” for the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and originating the title role in Wilson’s “King Hedley II” off-Broadway. “Theater is my first love,” he told Bloody Disgusting in 2019. “It’s the thing that rescued me in high school, and put me on a path of what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be an auto mechanic, I didn’t want to be a criminal. Everyone should have that eureka moment.”

Todd was determined to keep in touch with his original goal as a performer to play a wide and challenging range of parts, including ones that didn’t specifically require an actor who was Black and/or physically imposing. As a result, he had what you might call a complicated relationship with genre movies: he was very welcoming toward, and accessible to, fans who knew him from successful science fiction and horror projects, and he was grateful for how those parts opened other doors for him. “”Once ‘Star Trek’ happened, my personal growth as an actor sort of solidified,” he said in a 2014 Burnett Network interview. “I got the role in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and started booking all the hip TV shows, like ‘The X-Files’ and ‘NYPD Blue’ and all the things that were really, really popular at that time.”

But in interviews he was also open to talking about how he still struggled to get roles that were commensurate with his name recognition, mainly due to discrimination and preconceived notions about what parts he was “right” for. There was never any disrespect meant: he truly loved horror, science fiction and fantasy, was grateful for all they’d done for him, was a common sight in convention halls, and never condescended to the work or its fanbase. But at the same time, he wasn’t shy about discussing the challenges he faced in trying to diversify his gallery of parts, and the intellectual double-bind that came with being a genre star and a Black American. Todd got to play a wider range of parts than he’d probably get if he stuck to more realistic fare, but it could still be frustrating not to be considered for roles in the second category after having proven himself as a performer whose name in the credits conferred legitimacy.

“Unfortunately, there is a lot of ‘colorfast’ casting going on in the American system,” Todd said in a 1998 interview about his work as Cecrops on “Xena: Warrior Princess.” “Having trained classically when I was in school, we did everything. I had no idea I was going to hit a brick wall when I got out professionally and would be handed scripts for characters like ‘Slick’ and so forth.” Todd said one of the reasons he treasured roles like Cecrops and others offered to him by the production company behind “Xena,” Pacific Renaissance, is that they all could have been played by a white actor. “Someone had the imagination to know that I might be the best person for the job,” he said. “I applaud them for that. And the fans are not repulsed or anything like that. It’s an open-ended world. With “Xena,” particularly, I think part of her appeal is that she reaches out to victims of oppression, be it people of sexual orientation or minorities of any kind. As does ‘Hercules’ for that matter. And ‘Star Trek’ does the same thing. Maybe that’s why I tend to do more sci-fi. The realm of possibility is wide open. Being a Black American, and a successful Black American, I have access to a couple of different worlds here.”

Todd was a powerhouse actor no matter what role he played. The immensity of his accomplishments, even after all of the roadblocks placed in his path, demands respect and will be appreciated and studied by anyone who knows that some of the purest art can be found in supposedly disreputable places. The anguish and fury he communicated as Candyman made the character as pitiable as Frankenstein’s monster, despite the horrifying violence he inflicted. He’s in the genre pantheon with past greats like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff as well as newer stars like Doug Jones and Bill Skarsgård. But there’s still something quietly revelatory about getting to know Todd from his horror projects and then seeing him in something like “Platoon,” or in Rose’s ensemble drama “Traveling Light,” in which he plays an Uber driver named Caddy (one letter away from Candy) obsessively driving around Los Angeles looking for his runaway son. “Tony Todd can convey with just one head turn or eye-roll more than most actors can with reams of dialogue,” Bilge Ebiri wrote in his review of the movie for Vulture.

There was no emotional barrier between Todd and the audience. Whatever the character was feeling, you felt it, too. The feeling stayed with you.