Tony Todd has passed away. A veteran actor with a deep, resonant voice to match his towering frame, Todd amassed nearly 250 credits in a 40-year film and television career. But while he played superheroes, supervillains, Klingons, soldiers, jazzmen, preachers, cops, assassins, doctors, monsters, gangsters, generals, aliens, Transformers and more, Todd will inevitably be best remembered for one role: his title is surrendered . Horror hit from 1992 Candyman. (Referred to in mock hushed tones as “the film” when Todd discussed his legendary career in interviews.) It was the film that catapulted Todd into the blood-soaked spotlight, putting him on a first-name basis with fellow horror icons like Kane Hodder and Robert Englund; it is the film that most showcased his dual gift for charisma and menace. It was also just part of a career that stretched from the jungles of the Philippines for Oliver Stone to the far reaches of space for his many turns around the world. Star Trek franchise, and a hundred other points in between. Per TermTodd’s death on Wednesday was confirmed by his representatives this evening. He was 69.

Born in Washington DC, Todd pursued acting from an early age, earning a master’s degree in his field and working as an acting teacher in the early days of his career. A stint in theater in New York caught the attention of casting directors working for Oliver Stone, and Todd was offered his first film role in the mid-’80s: a small part in Platoonin which Todd traveled across the planet to film in the Philippines with a cast of soon-to-be big stars. A leading role in Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead remake a few years later raised his profile further, and he became a mainstay with one-episode stints on TV — including the rare distinction of a guest star starring in Stephen Bochco’s deeply bizarre film. Cop Rock. (“We couldn’t get the numbers,” Todd reminisced to us in a 2010 interview about his career. “We couldn’t get the ratings. But boy, was it fun!”) Remarkably, Todd got the first glimpse of what was going to happen during this period. eventually performed several gigs Star Pull; after auditioning again, and again for the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generationhe eventually got the role of Kurn, the Klingon brother of Michael Dorn’s Worf. Later, Todd would appear in three of the films in various roles Pull series, including in Deep space nine‘The Visitor’, widely regarded as one of the franchise’s finest hours, in no small part due to Todd’s performance as an aging, grief-stricken Jake Sisko.



But in 1992 we come to the dividing line of Todd’s career; it’s all for-Candymanor postalCandyman. Todd had to fight mightily to get the part, despite initially being unsure of what the film actually was. (“I get a call from my agent saying, ‘This director wants to see you, wants to meet you about this movie called Candyman.’ I thought he was joking. I mean, what is that? A Sammy Davis thing? What is that?”) But director Bernard Rose was convinced that Todd was the man to play murdered revenge seeker Daniel Robitaille, a role that required an actor as seductive as he was terrifying, a figure who exuded both sympathy and outright horror. (Todd, who acknowledged the influences: “I was heavily into the whole Dracula, Phantom Of The Opera thing.”) The resulting film was only a modest hit at the box office, but penetrated deeply into the American psyche, driven by his unique take on urban legends, the rarity of a black icon in the horror field and Todd’s own power on screen. (Also the bees.)

From then on, Todd was “Candyman‘s Tony Todd,’ making the rounds on the horror convention circuit, appearing in dozens of small-budget horror films and returning to the franchise three more times. (Most recently with Nia DaCosta’s 2021 update of the franchise.) But he also refused to allow himself to be reduced to a caricature and continued to offer performances that required his gravity, warmth and professionalism in everything from micro-budgeted horror films to massive Michael Bay films. blockbusters. (It’s not surprising that Todd became a prolific voice actor in his later years; just that a man with a voice like That it took so long for him to enter the field.) He picked up memorable roles on shows like The X fileshad a regular stint 24and in what was probably his most famous recurring role outside of it Candymanappeared in most of the Final destination films as the only man who usually it didn’t be daunted by Death’s various Rube Goldberg murder methods.

As an actor with his share of the world of horror, we would never argue that Tony Todd isn’t in one lot of films that are B-grade or lower, low-budget offerings that probably spent more on, well, casting Tony Todd than they did on footage or scripts. But us would claiming he rarely, if ever, gave a B-movie performance. Even in something like Tubi Original Hellblazers– one of his last film credits – shows a man taking his craft seriously, creating characters and giving them dignity and power. You never got less when you brought in Tony Todd.