Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Okay, so at some point in my life, someone once said to me in a conversation, “Muppet Treasure Island is proof that Tim Curry will act in anything.”  And I could swear I’ve read that Tim Curry had at some point given an interview where he said he always takes an acting job if it’s something he’s never done before … no matter how outlandish it might be.

Fast forward to … well, a while ago, when my buddy Aaron and I were at the movies.  I can’t remember exactly what we saw, and Colin Farrel wasn’t in it, but he was in probably 75% of the previews we saw in that movie … no joke.  As we were walking through the parking lot, the following conversation (as I recall it) took place:

Me: What’s up with Colin Farrel?  It seems like he’s in everything now.

Aaron: Yeah like he’ll act in anything.

Me: Yeah he’s just like … what’s his name?

I have this thing with names.  I forget them.  Even people I know.  And work with.  And there are people I see every day at work, and I don’t know their names.  So me not being able to remember “what’s his name” during this conversation was a not-surprising, frustratingly-common occurrence.

Eventually I looked it up on the smart phone I had at the time and discovered I was thinking of Tim Curry.

Now this is not to equate the two in their capabilities as actors.  They are (to put it kindly) very different people.  And of course Tim Curry has been around for a lot longer than Colin Farrel has.  But when you’ve seen the variation of movies Tim Curry has been in, and note the dearth of movies Colin Farrel was in, particularly between 2002 and 2003 (so I assume my conversation with Aaron took place somewhere around early to mid 2002), the link can be made.

So, for a while there, when it came to Aaron and I, all one of us had to do was look at the other and say “Tim Curry” and the other would say “Colin Farrel.”  Or visa versa.