These Rocky Horror Picture Show Secrets Won't Drive You Insane

Mick Jagger Wanted to Play Frank-N-Furter

Stage stars don't always make the leap to the screen when a musical is turned into a movie, no matter how iconic their performance—and that could have happened to Tim Curry, who originated the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter at London's Royal Court Theatre.

“When the movie was a definite thing, there were several big stars who wanted to play the part,” the Clue alum told the Los Angeles Times in 2025. "Mick Jagger wanted to play it and he would’ve done a great job if you saw [the 1970 film] Performance. But [director Jim Sharman] said he wanted me to do it. I don’t think the studio was happy that he turned down Mick.”

The Studio Wanted a New Brad and Janet, Dammit

Most of the stage cast did make the jump to the left and step to the right for the film adaptation—except Christopher Malcom and Julie Covington, the original Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, the newly engaged couple seeking shelter from a storm who stumble into a sexual awakening.

"I was given two options," Richard O'Brien—who wrote the musical, adapted the screenplay with Sharman, and played hunchbacked butler Riff Raff in both— told The Guardian in 2025. "One was a reasonable budget with rock stars and the other one was a tiny budget keeping the original team together."

But, "I thought it was fine to have Americans playing the Americans, and it was great to have [Barry Bostwick] and [Susan Sarandon], who were, at that time, not particularly known."

How Susan Sarandon Got the Role of Janet Despite Being Terrified of Singing

When Sarandon showed up where auditions for the film were taking place in L.A., she was just stopping by to say hi to Curry, whom she met after catching him in the stage show.

"I wasn't thinking of auditioning," the Oscar winner told Business Insider in 2024. "I had another project and Tim was like, 'Oh my God, why don't you read?' I was like, 'I can't really sing.' And he said, 'Well, just read.'"

And "the reading went well, but then they said, 'Well, can you sing 'Happy Birthday?'"

Sarandon didn't feel that she could, but she took the role and "just apologized the entire time we were laying down the tracks."

Way Over the Rainbow

Rocky Horror Show director turned first-time feature filmmaker Sharman was envisioning "a dark version of The Wizard of Oz," he told the LA Times. And making the movie was indeed a whirlwind.

“The reason we don’t have great anecdotes from the shoot is we didn’t have time for anecdotes,” he noted. "It was shot in five weeks.”

Indeed, O'Brien told The Guardian, "You went home, straight to bed, to get up the next day. We didn’t have time to party."

Bare Bones

They filmed at Bray Studios, home of the iconic Hammer horror films, on a $1 million budget.

"We were an hour outside of London," Sarandon recalled to Entertainment Tonight in 2025, "the studio had no roof, it was January. I got a pneumonia almost immediately, as one does when they're in their underwear, wet, in a freezing-cold studio."

"When I see it," she noted, "I think, 'God, we must have had so much fun.' But actually, it was quite difficult."

Bostwick agreed, calling it "a miserable shoot."

"I was always wet, I was in my underwear," he told The Guardian, "and every 20 minutes, the prop guy was spraying me down with ice-cold water, because they apparently didn’t know how to heat up water in England at the time."

Added Nell Campbell, who played maid Columbia, "We would have to hike to the bathrooms. And we were all being paid a very small amount."

Peter Hinton Didn't Want to Touch-a-Touch Susan Sarandon

Model Peter Hinton—who, playing Frank's statuesque, scantily clad creation Rocky, really lights Janet's fire—"was just the shyest, quietest," Sarandon recalled in the 2025 documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror. "I think that was traumatizing to him to have to do that scene with me."

Hinton, now an antiques dealer, concurred. "I was quite insecure about my talents and abilities," he explained. "Now it turns out I did okay. It’s a bit of a mystery, really."

Sarandon, however, had a real lust for the scene's message.

"Janet was trying to appeal to her idiot boyfriend and then, at the same time, feeling things she hadn’t felt and experiencing things she hadn’t done before and uncovering a deep sexuality," she said. "I think the movie’s about saying yes, to life and to everything."

Tim Curry No Longer Had DIY Makeup

Curry did his own makeup for the stage, so while Frank-N-Furter's look doesn't scream subtle, "it was just a lot trashier" in the play, he told the LA Times. French makeup artist Pierre La Roche took over those duties for the film.

As O'Brien remembered to The Guardian, "When we got into the studio, Frank became very glamorous, and it was rather lovely."

Lip Service

Those bright-red lips emerging from the dark screen singing "Science Fiction" at the very beginning of the film?

"They [erased] my face completely and painted my lips,'" Patricia Quinn, who played Riff Raff's sister Magenta, told The Guardian. "I started to do it but the lips kept going out of frame. The lighting guy said, 'You see that lamp, that’s clamped in that clamp? Bring it down and clamp her head.' So they brought over [the clamp] and screwed in the top and the sides, so I was clamped."

The Sex Was Almost on Fire

Shooting "the orgy in the swimming pool," Bostwick remembered everybody "kissing and fondling underwater."

When they got out of the pool, he continued, "we went into a little warming booth. We had a cup of tea, and as we were leaving, it caught on fire. Everybody was afraid it was going to burn down the whole set, and we would be shut down. We got out just in time."

How the Rocky Horror Midnight Screening Phenomenon Took Hold

Even though the opening song sets the scene for a "late-night, double-feature picture show," initially it was just a low-budget movie that flopped when it came out in August 1975.

Only when it was re-released in April 1976 for midnight screenings at the Waverly (now IFC) Theater in NYC's Greenwich Village did it turn into a FOMO-inducing event.

And Curry happened to be living a block away when the lines started to form.

Because there was such a clamor to get in, the film's star called the theater for a ticket "and the operator said, 'You're the third Tim Curry to call this week,'" the actor recalled on NPR's Fresh Air in 2005. "Finally, I showed up and they sort of believed me and took me in. Word spread rather swiftly and people were coming up and touching me, and running away and giggling."

But then an usher came up and "dragged me out of my seat and announced that I was an imposter and threw me out of the theater."

Space Oddity

The first "audience participation" Curry ever witnessed came courtesy of David Bowie's first wife Angie Barnett.

"When [Riff Raff] was about to kill me," Curry said on Fresh Air, "she shouted, 'No, no, don't do it!'…And [composer] Marc Shaiman was the first person to talk back at the Waverly…And now, of course, it's everywhere."

Campell quipped to The Guardian, "Now they pretty much call out after every line. The original things were very witty and hilarious. But now—and I know that my fellow cast members agree—it’s too much because you can hardly hear anything without them screaming out."

Why Rocky Horror Picture Show Audiences Threw Toast at the Screen

The Truth About the Cast's Paychecks

"Susan made $5,000 more than me," Bostwick recalled in the 2025 documentary SANE INSIDE INSANITY. "I think I made $15,000 and she made $20,000 on the whole movie."

The Spin City alum added, "We got a little bit of the soundtrack. We got like $1,000 or something a year, less than that now."

Quinn recalled getting paid "$300 a week" and feeling lucky to be making it.

"For a film like that, you would never ever have gotten a big budget because people thought you were insane," casting director Celestia Fox explained. Whatever the actors were paid was "absolutely the going rate," and no one could have predicted that the studio would end up "making millions and millions."

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Sort of Has a Sequel

Spoiler alert, though the film's explosive ending doesn't exactly lend itself to a follow-up, the1981 film Shock Treatment revived Brad and Janet—played by Cliff DeYoung and Janet Harper—and featured Quinn and Campbell as different characters.

"It’s a flawed piece," O'Brien, who reteamed with Sharman to make it, told The Guardian. "I’m not happy with it, truthfully."

Sharman nixed the first draft, which featured Rocky taking Frank's body to Jonathan Adams' Dr. Scott to be reanimated—he thought the first movie was "self-contained," he explained—but he did want to work with O'Brien again.

"We depicted an America enslaved by reality TV run by a megalomaniac," the director noted. "It didn’t fly—maybe the satire seemed too dark and far-fetched for the time— though it has proved prophetic."