Child’s Play: Brad Dourif on the Power of Fans
Tom Holland’s Child’s Play is widely regarded as a horror classic, and for good reason… it’s a damned good film that launched one hell of a franchise. Was it always that way, though?
Brad Dourif (the voice of Chucky) chimed in on an interview with the AV CLUB that painted a bit of a different picture, one in which he didn’t voice the titular icon. One that would be fixed thanks to audience reaction.
“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,” Dourif continues. “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.”
Can you even fathom Child’s Play without Dourif? Lord knows we can’t!
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