The tall, placid, dreamy-eyed actor Tony Todd, who has died aged 69, brought an incongruous yet haunting tenderness to his frequent appearances in the horror genre. His signature role was the undead, hook-handed, bee-stung title character in Candyman (1992), who materialises whenever someone is foolhardy enough to say his name five times while looking in the mirror. Though Todd is unseen for the first 45 minutes, his voice is heard in the movie’s opening seconds. “With my hook for a hand, I’ll split you from your groin to your gullet,” he promises.
But this was no straightforward ghoul. The Candyman was once Daniel Robitaille, a 19th-century portrait painter whose romance with a white woman drove her father, a racist landowner, to hire local townsfolk to kill him. One of his hands was hacked off; he was then drenched in honey and left to the mercy of bees, which stung him to death. Todd invested the character with elegance, nobility and sensitivity. Monstrous he may have become, but the audience was never permitted to forget the man he once was.
Though most of the film is set in latter-day Chicago, the actor’s research focused on the character’s origins. “He was educated in the highest European society, so I took fencing, riding and waltzing classes,” he told Cinefantastique magazine in 1995. It was his idea that Robitaille should be a painter. “That really brings his sense of rage and loss into focus: the mutilation to his painting hand fuels a great deal of that anger.”
The picture was a cut above most modern horror. Adapted by the idiosyncratic British director Bernard Rose from a story by Clive Barker, it featured a score by Philip Glass and cinematography by Anthony B Richmond (Don’t Look Now). There was also real weight and resonance to its handling of race. “There are a lot of black fans of Candyman,” Todd pointed out once the film was released. “I think what he really represents is empowerment … which makes him a very attractive figure to the dissatisfied, the disenfranchised.”
Executives got cold feet, however, about the on-screen relationship between Todd and his white co-star, Virginia Madsen. “We couldn’t get [the] love scenes past the studio,” he said in 2021. “The studio got nervous and thought a black and white eroticism would [negatively] impact the box office.”
The real challenge of the series, he noted, “has been trying to convince the studio bosses to go with this sort of complex spectre instead of the kind of ‘cookie-cutter’ monster … We’ve leaned towards a classical horror figure à la Charles Laughton’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Despite such high-calibre reference points, it was basic curiosity that attracted Todd to the project: he was keen to know how the scene in which hundreds of bees emerge from the Candyman’s mouth would be executed. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to do the part,” he told Starburst magazine in 1993. An entomologist hired by the production kept him up to speed with preparations, while the producers ribbed him by sending out “Bee Memos” which read: “Bee Day is Coming.”
A special mouthpiece was designed to prevent the insects from entering his throat. “The day we shot the scene, they assured me the bees were stingerless … The next thing I knew, there was a funnel in my mouth and they’re pouring 300 moving creatures into it.”
His contractual clause, which guaranteed him $1,000 for every sting he sustained, left him $3,000 richer by the end of the shoot. He was even better off after Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), where he pocketed more than $20,000 in penalties thanks to a quirk of timing: “You can only work bees in the morning, and we shot at nine at night.”
The sequel, which contained flashbacks to Robitaille’s murder, was more gruesome but less poetic. Todd also appeared in Candyman 3 (1999), AKA Candyman: Day of the Dead, and the well-regarded remake Candyman (2021).
Other horror work included The Crow (1993), which became infamous after its star, Brandon Lee, was killed on set in a shooting accident. In the inventive Final Destination franchise, which is predicated on most of the characters being wiped out by the end of each film, Todd was the rare cast member who appeared in more than one instalment: as the funeral director William Bludworth, he was in the 2000 original as well as parts two (2003) and five (2011), while his voice was heard in part three (2006). He is rumoured to appear in the newest instalment, Final Destination: Bloodlines, which is due for release in 2025.
Todd was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. He was educated at Hartford high school then studied at the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Centre in Hartford. His first acting job was with Modern Times Theatre, a travelling political theatre group.
He relocated to New York where he was spotted on stage by the casting director of Platoon, and hired for that 1986 Oliver Stone Vietnam drama. “I can remember very vividly standing at the pay phone on 34th Street and Third Avenue and saying, ‘Guess what, Mom? I’m going to the Philippines!’”
Moving to Los Angeles just as Platoon opened, his career took off. Small roles followed in Dennis Hopper’s gangland drama Colors and Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird (both 1988) as well as television series including three episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990-91), in which he was cast as a Klingon. He reprised the role in a further Star Trek spin-off, Deep Space Nine (1995-96), in which he also played a second character.
Todd starred in the 1990 remake of the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, having admired the 1968 original because “it featured a strong black character in a situation that didn’t call attention to his race”. He was also in the action thriller The Rock (1996) opposite Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery and Ed Harris, though most of his subsequent roles were in television and theatre, as well as in innumerable horror films.
In the last decade alone, his credits in the genre included Grave Walkers, and Scream at the Devil (both 2015), Broken Cross, and Zombies (both 2016), Death House (2017), Hell Fest, The Final Wish, and Requiem (all 2018), the Halloween-based Candy Corn and three episodes of Scream: The TV Series (all 2019). Among the films of his still to be released are Werewolf Game and The Witching Hour.
A notable exception was Travelling Light (2021), which reunited him with Rose, his Candyman director. They had also worked together on a 2015 update of Frankenstein set in Los Angeles, in which Todd was the blind homeless man who befriends the Creature. Production on Travelling Light, in which Todd played an Uber driver ferrying people to a cult gathering during the pandemic, coincided with the first weekend of protests about the death of George Floyd, which were incorporated into the film.
Todd is survived by his wife, Fatima Cortez, whom he married in 1986, and their children Ariana and Alexander.
• Anthony (Tony) Tiran Todd, actor, born 4 December 1954; died 6 November 2024
