Can you imagine the Child’s Play movies… without Brad Dourif?!
The Academy Award-nominated actor is of course the man who voiced Chucky in every single film, to date, in the Child’s Play franchise, giving the series a level of consistency not found in any of the other big horror franchises. Needless to say, all six films in the franchise wouldn’t be what they are without Brad Dourif, who lent a personality to Chucky that has helped make the killer doll one of the biggest – even though he’s technically the smallest – slasher icons in the genre’s history.
But in a new interview with AV Club, Dourif just revealed something quite surprising. Believe it or not, he almost didn’t voice Chucky in the original Child’s Play!
“What happened is when they did the first Child’s Play, I was doing Mississippi Burning at the time, and they needed me to go to the studio, which, of course, I couldn’t go to because I was on set working, so they got somebody else,” Dourif told the site. “They just couldn’t wait around. They got this guy, and him and Tom Holland did the whole movie, and they stood up and they laughed their asses off, and apparently it was really funny, and they loved it, and they put it in front of an audience, and the audience hated it. They fucking hated it.”
“At that point, I’d finished working on Mississippi Burning,” the actor continued. “I was going to go to Woodstock and spend some time there, and they said, ‘No, no, no. Please come and do this,’ so I went there and did it. I listened to what they did, and I just said, ‘It’s very clear why this doesn’t work. You can’t really play it comedically. He’s serious, and what’s funny is funny.’ The ‘fuck you’ on the elevator, that was just improv. I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. I know what to do here.’ It wasn’t like we were against something that’s funny. Everything is about the event, and Chucky’s always had to be a little camp. He’s never not been camp. It’s been a huge part of what’s made him successful. It eventually went into total self-referential, which was Bride and Seed, and now that everybody’s doing remakes, it’s gone back to being scarier.”
To the fans who encouraged Tom Holland to give Brad Dourif another call, we thank you!
