Tim Curry Reveals His Favorite Lost CLUE Ending and the Exhausting Day That Sent Him to the Hospital
Tim Curry spends the final stretch of Clue racing around Hill House like a man possessed, explaining an increasingly complicated series of murders at breakneck speed. Turns out filming all that chaos was just as exhausting as it looks.
During a visit to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library before he passed away, Curry looked through original production materials from the 1985 murder mystery comedy and shared some great stories about playing Wadsworth, working with the incredible ensemble cast, and shooting a fourth ending that audiences never got to see.
Curry’s path to Wadsworth was pretty simple. He already knew Clue director Jonathan Lynn because they had attended the same boarding school, and Curry liked his work.
He said: “Jonathan Lynn, I knew because we went to the same boarding school and he was a bit of a hero of mine. I'd been working a lot in the theater and he'd seen some of it and he actually just offered me the part.”
Once filming began, Curry found himself surrounded by a killer comedy cast, including Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White. One of the movie’s funniest moments came when Kahn improvised her wonderfully strange description of how much she hated Yvette.
Curry shared: “Yeah, Meline was so great. She improvised this line. Flames on the side of my face.” Kahn’s delivery completely got Curry. “I was practically on the floor. I thought she was so funny.”
That line always has me cracking up! You might assume a movie as manic as Clue involved plenty of improvisation from everyone, but Curry says that wasn’t the case for him. “No. God, no.”
Much of the comedy depended on careful blocking and timing. The production paperwork Curry was shown at the library revealed just how meticulously the characters and their movements were organized, right down to color coding.
That precision became especially important during Wadsworth’s frantic reconstruction of the murders near the end of the film. Curry runs from room to room, retracing everyone’s movements and physically reenacting the various killings.
According to production records preserved by the library, Curry was taken to the hospital after reporting that he wasn’t feeling well. A doctor determined he had high blood pressure.
Curry immediately remembered what he had been shooting that day, and said: “That was the day that we shot me running around demonstrating each murder and stab. It was exhausting.”
Watching the sequence again with that story in mind makes Curry’s performance even crazier. Wadsworth barely stops moving or talking as he drags the entire cast through the mansion and pieces together the mystery. Curry is essentially driving the whole finale at full speed!
The paperwork shown to Curry also confirmed a great piece of Clue history. The movie is famous for having three different endings, which were originally distributed to theaters so audiences could see different solutions to the mystery. However, the production actually filmed four.
Curry confirmed that the missing version put Wadsworth at the center of everything, “There was one ending where I did all the murders and of course that was my favorite.”
So why didn't audiences get Curry's preferred ending? According to Curry, “They never released that ending because they thought it was too obvious.”
It’s a shame because a version of Clue where Tim Curry turns out to be the lunatic responsible for every murder sounds like a hell of a way to finish the movie.
In the end, Curry’s Wadsworth holds the whole crazy thing together. I loved his performance in that movie!