Tony Todd Pulled Off The Impossible: He Made Us Cry During A ‘Final Destination’ Movie

The six-movie Final Destination series has not exactly served as an incubator for fresh acting talent. That’s nothing necessarily against the long line of youngish actors who have gamely agreed to get absolutely pulverized by the cruelty of death’s design over the past quarter-century; it’s just that hardly any of them have gone on to storied careers, even as horror-movie icons.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, from the third film, is one exception; Devon Sawa, from the first film, is another, sort of, though his excellent work in Final Destination didn’t really result in much of a leading-man career. (Now, thankfully, he’s settled into a fine horror-plus career; he’s done particularly versatile work as multiple characters throughout three seasons of Chucky.) Seann William Scott was in the first movie, but he had already broken out thanks to American Pie the previous summer. His castmate Ali Larter has done well enough for herself, and I’m told that A.J. Cook from the second film has enjoyed a lengthy CBS-procedural career. Otherwise… Michael Landes? Haley Webb? Nicholas D’Agosto? Katrina VanDerveer? Ryan Merriman? Many working actors, to be sure, but not household names. You aren’t even sure which of those five names I just made up.

It’s a little strange, then, that the latest movie, Final Destination Bloodlines, derives a standout moment from one of its actors. I don’t immediately think of the late Tony Todd as a “Final Destination actor” when mentally cataloging if any of them went anywhere, in part because he was already a known quantity from the horror classic Candyman, and in part because while Todd appears in the majority of the movies, he also stands apart from the action, observing the characters and offering advice without jumping into the fray. In the first installment, he plays a mortician who briefly explains the rules of the unseen force that seems to be stalking survivors of a plane crash; his whispery menace and familiar face were enough for some audience members to infer that the man called William Bludworth may have actually been Death himself, or at least some kind of earthly emissary.

Bludworth pops up again in Final Destination 2, and Todd’s voice is heard briefly in the third movie. He sits out the fourth, then shows up again in the fifth (which makes particular sense given the eventual reveal of that film’s timeline), imparting wisdom about death’s design and offering hints on how the heroes might be able to work around it. (They never really work.) Recurring characters are not really a thing with this series, so Todd is the only actor who could really be conceivably brought back for Bloodlines, where his character is given a cute (well, for this series, anyway) backstory, and a single scene for Todd, who was gravely ill at the time of filming and passed away in 2024 at the age of 70.

On paper, it’s a typical Final Destination where Bludworth pops up to offer some information and advice. In practice, it goes in a different and unexpectedly moving direction at the end. Todd was allowed to go off-script and finish his scene himself. Musing on the inevitability of death, he doesn’t speak to menace. Instead, Todd all but breaks the fourth wall, speaking to the characters but really to the audience who has enjoyed his distinctive gravitas for decades: “I intend to enjoy the time I have left. And I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when… Good luck.”

The meta dimension of this moment make it easily the most emotional scene in the entire series, which has veered toward the fliply fatalistic in recent entries. There’s an electricity to the realization that Todd, who also appeared in The Crow, Platoon, The Rock, countless TV shows, and roughly three to six DTV horror movies a year for most of the past quarter-century, is taking control over his on-screen image for a final appearance. It’s so graceful and sincere that it almost knocks you out of the movie. Plenty of big-name actors have notable final films or de facto “farewell” roles, even if some of those are accidents of fate. Character actors, those men and women who can improve a movie just by popping up for a few minutes, are rarely afforded such well-known exits. They tend to work and work and eventually disappear. (That’s especially true of so many minority performers.) So it’s ultimately fitting that Todd is able to use the ultimate star-free horror franchise – one that doesn’t even have a masked “star” like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers – to step forward from the anonymity and confirm his status as a horror icon. In a single scene, a great character actor becomes an avatar of a life well-lived.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.