Child’s Play’s Brad Dourif Almost Didn’t Get To Be A Doll
When the studios were attempting to bring back the slasher villains of the 80’s a few years ago, the actors playing them were mostly recast — except for one. Brad Dourif has remained the sole voice actor behind Child’s Play’s Chucky ever since his invention. Even Robert Englund has lost the role of Freddy to age, but there’s something about plastic that makes it durable.
And to think he nearly didn’t get the part. As Dourif tells AV Club, “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.”
“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.”
Dourif doesn’t say who that original actor was, but because he tested poorly, Dourif was dragged in. “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.”
He says playing a killer Cabbage Patch knockoff is more complex than you might think, and that one has to gain a sense for what lines should be read seriously. “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.’…..[But] 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.”