The thing you hear most often from people who knew the man, not just the movies, was that he was nice. He’d apparently have people over to his house for enormous home-cooked meals; his wife, Greta, didn’t like his movies, because she didn’t like how they portrayed her husband. He was a pussycat. It’s just that he was an enormous pussycat with a past as a wrestling villain and a thick, halting voice.

He wasn’t discovered by Ed Wood. He had actually been acting longer than Wood directed. He’s even in some good movies—when Nick and Nora go to the wrestling match in Shadow of the Thin Man, he’s one of the wrestlers. Almost all of his roles were some wrestler or another, in fact, and the one thing you have to say is that Bride of the Monster gave him a different character to play. (In fact, he said he played two different Lobos, one who could talk and one who couldn’t. He said that Night of the Ghouls Lobo was the same as Bride of the Monster Lobo.) And in fact, it seems as though his work for Wood and for Coleman Francis in The Beast of Yucca Flats killed his career.

But it’s true that there’s not a lot of work just in general for men who look like Tor Johnson. When he did You Bet Your Life, he weighed 367 pounds. He was 6’3″, and even with hair, he wouldn’t have looked—frankly, he wouldn’t have looked normal. It’s hard to picture someone like Tor Johnson in a romantic comedy. Heck, it’s hard to picture him in a nice, normal family picture even though we know he had a nice, normal family. Poor Tor was typecast by nature and by our tendency to stereotype people by appearance.

Could Tor Johnson act? We’ll never know. No one ever asked him to, not really. Ed Wood and Coleman Francis asked him to lumber, and a lot of other people asked him to loom. That’s what his purpose seems to have been in most films, and we’ll never know if he could have done anything else. Honestly, I don’t even know if he wanted to or not. I wonder if that information would be in his You Bet Your Life appearance, which I haven’t seen. But can you picture Tor Johnson as Hamlet? Or even in a Bergman film? One assumes, after all, that his Swedish was better than his English.

And, yes, I’ll always picture him with puppets in the corner. I can’t help it. That, too, is part of who he is. I don’t know if he’s part of the cabal that did foolish things in Plan 9 From Outer Space to see what it would take to get Ed Wood to do a second take, but I like to think he was. I like to think of him as an ordinary guy who was willing to do silly things to be in the movies. He certainly wouldn’t have been alone in that.

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