Tony Todd, Star of Candyman Horror Series, Dead at 69
Tony Todd, the American actor who rose to reputation along with his maximum iconic role inside the hit horror film “Candyman,” died Wednesday morning.
Todd played the Candyman title character, a ghost man with a rope for summoned liquor who repeated his name 5 times in front of a mirror.
Additionally, he first played Candyman in the 1992 film and then reprized the role in sequels in 1995 and 1999, as well as the 2021 sequel to the original story.
Born in 1932, Todd has spent 40 years in films, stage productions and TV dramas, including leading roles in Transformers and Final Destination.
Candyman sees Todd play the avenging spirit of the artist Daniel Robitaille, a Black man who got lynched in the 1800s. The original 1992 film followed his accidental summoning into the physical world through a curious Chicago graduate student researching the urban legend, which led to a series of deadly occurrences.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Todd remembered the infamous scene in which Candyman is surrounded by bees. “Stung 23 times, $1,000 bonus per sting,” he said.
“Anything truly valuable requires some measure of suffering,” he added.
Talking of Candyman, Todd said in the same interview, “I’ve done over 200 films, but this is the one that stays with people. It resonates across races and backgrounds.
I’ve even used it as a tool in gang intervention work, asking, ‘What scares you? What terrifying things have you gone through?'”
In a tribute, Candyman actress Virginia Madsen, who played student Helen Lyle, said Todd “is now an angel as he was in life.” She described him as “a truly poetic man” with “a profound understanding of the arts.”
“I’ll miss him so dreadfully, hope he haunts me now and then, but I won’t be summoning him into the mirror!” she added.
The second of the series of the original film, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, set three years after the first, found Todd’s haunting character return to New Orleans, where he meets up with the descendant of his daughter.
The third film, Candyman: Day of the Dead, follows in 1999, taking place in Los Angeles in 2020. Todd and several original cast members returned for the reboot in 2021.
In 2020, Todd described the new sequel as “fantastic, and also DaCosta is “a fan of visceral horror.” Madsen bid her goodbyes in a thank-you, including to screenwriter Jordan Peele for the “gift” of allowing her and Todd “to live again as lovers.”
One of Todd’s first films was the 1986 war drama Platoon, as Sergeant Warren.
