‘I can't believe people like my work!' Brad Dourif on the road from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Chucky

The Guardian

12 hours ago

Brad Dourif knew it was time to retire from acting when he stopped feeling … well, anything about the parts he was being offered. 'I got to a place where if somebody offered me something, all I felt was an empty: oh.' It had started in 2013, after a production of Tennessee Williams's The Two-Character Play. That had been an extraordinary experience, with his co-star Amanda Plummer 'by far the best actor I've ever worked with', but left him wondering if there was anything he still wanted to do professionally. Acting no longer got him excited; it just left him tired. 'It became clear to me after a while that I just really didn't want to work any more.'
We speak over video call from his home in upstate New York, where he lives with Claudia, his girlfriend of 30-plus years, a poet and songwriter, and his tabby cats Honey Mustard and Snapdragon. Instead of working, he is building and decorating a swimming pool-sized enclosure for them, so that they can be outdoors safely at night. 'You might call it a catio but we call it kitty city!' he says. 'My friend who helped me build this thing gave it a once-over and he went: 'Expensive cats!'' Dourif, 75, is enjoying retirement so much that it takes a nudge from his agent to pull him away from the fantasy novel he is immersed in to alert him to the fact that he is 20 minutes late for our call.
Dourif is worth the wait: he is a wonderful raconteur, with countless tales from his prolific, eclectic career as a character actor. Though his breakthrough role was as the vulnerable Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he was nominated for an Emmy as the honourable Doc Cochran in the HBO television series Deadwood, he is probably best known for playing villains (the treacherous Gríma Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, the psychotic Gemini Killer in Exorcist III) and creeps (the astoundingly weird Piter de Vries in David Lynch's Dune). And then there's Chucky, the serial killer trapped in a child's doll, voiced by Dourif for more than 30 years. It's his signature role, and pretty much the only thing he would come out of retirement for – that and working with his family. He has been married twice, and one of his daughters is an actor. He also has a stepdaughter who writes and directs.
'It's been a life of a lot of pressure,' says Dourif. 'And the pressure adds up, even when things are really working well.'
First, there's the money. Though he says he's now fine financially, that hasn't always been the case. 'I'm a character guy; I didn't make money hand over fist. I mean, I did OK and I could support myself and my family, but it wasn't always right there.'
And then there was the mental toll his roles took on him, as he found himself forced to take on too many personalities that he would despise in real life. Eventually he told his agent: 'If it's a bad guy, I'm not interested. I've done too many, and I don't like the way I feel afterwards.'
'You find meaning in things – that's the whole struggle,' Dourif says. 'And you just live with them for a while. For most of my life, I could pop right out [of character]. But eventually what happened is my 'shock absorbers' were gone and stuff would linger. It wasn't that I was crazy – it was just that the emotional things couldn't get out of me and some of the horribleness couldn't … I mean, I played a lot of killers and things, really dark shit, and it was much more difficult for me to get out of – Chucky being the exception.'
The first time Dourif struggled to shake off a role was Alan Parker's 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, in which he plays a racist police officer who beats his wife, played by Frances McDormand. One day, on set, 'she was in the makeup eating lunch after what I had done to her, and I suddenly felt like: 'Is this who I am? Is this what my life is? This kind of person is who I sort of identified myself with or allowed to be my world.' And I got really depressed for about two, three years.'
Watching Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire pulled him out of the funk. 'There was a speech about what it was like to be alive, to be in the world. And that really changed me. It snapped me out of it. I just went: no, this is just my way of being alive.'
Dourif was born in 1950, in Huntington, West Virginia, where he enjoyed a comfortable childhood. 'West Virginia's really beautiful and, you know, my family had money, so it was easy and nice.' That's not to say it was without challenges. Dourif struggled to concentrate and had issues with short-term memory. 'I was just not designed for school,' he says. 'I struggled a lot, frankly. Everybody in my family was really smart, but I was ADD [attention deficit disorder]' – though he didn't know at the time – 'and I flunked the third grade. Life was much more difficult for me than I would have liked it to have been.'
His father, an art collector, died when Dourif was very young, and his mother married William C Campbell, who ran an insurance company and was also a championship golfer. Dourif describes him as 'difficult', not least because of the approach he took to his stepson's learning difficulties. 'He was trying to school out brain chemistry, which can't be done. So that was a stressful relationship.'
His mother was more patient. 'She taught me how to read. It wasn't fun. It was just hard on her and on me. But I really looked up to her. I adored her.' Joan Dourif, who died recently, was an actor at a community theatre. Dourif was already aware of her talent from the way she told stories to him and his five siblings but then he saw her perform a scene about a butterfly – 'I could see the butterfly. I wondered, how the hell could she do that?' It inspired him to try to make it as an actor too, although there was a brief spell when he thought he might be a flower arranger. 'My feeling was there was nothing else really I could do. I had to make that work.'
In the early 1970s, after a brief spell at Marshall University in Huntington, Dourif moved to New York City and became a member of the Circle Repertory Company. It was here that the film director Miloš Forman spotted him in Mark Medoff's play When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? and cast him as the delicate, tormented Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
Bibbit is a tragic figure with a severe stutter and a debilitating mother complex that keeps him in a psychiatric hospital. To prepare for the role, Dourif borrowed a textbook from a speech therapist friend. 'I kind of reverse-engineered it,' he says. 'I started doing stutter exercises in public places where people were in a hurry and there were lines and people didn't have time for you, so it was a kind of stress situation.'
His tender, agonising performance earned Dourif a Golden Globe award, a Bafta and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. He was just 24. 'I think the most extraordinary experience as an actor that I've had in film was Cuckoo's Nest,' Dourif says now. 'When things get magical, there's no comparison.'
At 30, he took the lead role in John Huston's black comedy Wise Blood (1979) – and demonstrated his considerable range. Frenetic, intense, a man of conviction, the eccentric preacher Hazel Motes, founder of the Church of Truth Without Christ, is everything Billy Bibbit is not.
Despite another acclaimed performance, the roles Dourif was offered showed there were limits to how high he could expect to rise. 'It became pretty evident I was a character actor, and I certainly wasn't going to be a star,' says Dourif. 'But, you know, I was going to have a career.'
After another Forman film, Ragtime (1981), he took a job as an acting teacher at Columbia University. There, he taught directors how to work with actors, which in turn helped his own acting. 'I was quite passionate about it,' he says. 'I began to realise there are certain things that directors absolutely need from an actor. And to fight them is just destructive. So I learned a lot more about what my job is.'
Though he loved teaching, he gave it up after five years to concentrate on acting. David Lynch, who had enjoyed Dourif's performance in Wise Blood, cast him in two supporting roles, first in Dune (1984), then in Blue Velvet (1986). 'He was a mad genius and one of the most delightful people you could ever be around,' says Dourif. 'I was inspired by the way he saw things. He directed actors like a painter's strokes. He had a kind of innocence and extraordinarily detailed vision, like nobody I ever worked with.'
When Dourif first met Lynch on the Dune set, he was confronted with a question. 'He just looked at me and said: 'Brad, how do you feel about actors having surgery?' I said: 'I'm fine with it – as long as it's not on me.'' Lynch, it turned out, was trying to convince the German actor Jürgen Prochnow to have a tube put through his cheek for a scene that involved biting down on a tooth to release a green gas. 'Lynch is like a schoolkid sitting next to [producer] Raffaella De Laurentiis, and he goes: 'Why not? Why not?' And she goes: 'No, no, it's not gonna happen – forget it.' He had a childlike enthusiasm and this genius mind.'
It was in 1988 that Dourif became the voice of Chucky, in the slasher movie Child's Play. The franchise has since spawned seven sequels, a TV show and all manner of other media, and in 2013 it became a family business, with his actor daughter Fiona taking a starring role.
Dourif has voiced Chucky throughout, bar a 2019 reboot voiced by Mark Hamill. 'At first I kind of worked on a Chicago accent,' he remembers, 'and then I thought: 'You know what? This is camp shit. Don't make this too real.' So I just kind of let it go and let it happen. Chucky's just this homicidal maniac who loves his job. That's who he is. And he has a serious fear of oblivion, but beyond that there's nothing serious about him.' Does Dourif share that same fear? 'I have been at times in my life very, very frightened about it, but at this point I'm not so much. As it gets closer!'
After Chucky, Dourif became something of a staple in the horror genre, often brought in to add a touch of sinister. Standout moments include his nightmarish monologue to camera as the Gemini Killer in the Exorcist III (1990) and his all but kissing a xenomorph in Alien Resurrection (1997). He didn't particularly choose to become embroiled in horror – he simply hit a groove and was grateful for the work.
Especially after Kristina, the first of his two daughters, was born (Dourif has one daughter with each of his two ex-wives). 'I just looked at her and something deep inside me said: 'OK, I get it.' It was now about selling myself on the marketplace, because my job was raising my kid.'
So money was all that mattered? 'Look,' he says. 'When I have a part, I do the absolute very best I can. There's no holding back, but let's just say that the impetus was always: I need a job.'
In the 90s, there were years when Dourif would have seven movie credits. 'It really was a pretty low bar that would keep me from doing a movie. But I always put my heart in it. I would somehow convince myself that we were going to make it good and, you know, I was always wrong!
'To this day, I can't believe that people like my work,' he says. 'It just astounds me. It's just ridiculous to me. I look at it and I just see all kinds of faults and none of it looks good.'
Not that his career didn't have some highs, like his time on The Lord of the Rings movies. 'Everywhere you turned, there was never anything that wasn't incredible,' he says. He recalls standing in costume by a wooden fortress in New Zealand, looking out over snowcapped peaks and deep valleys, while actors with capes and swords flitted around thatched huts. 'I was standing by Ian McKellen and we were looking out, and there was this marsh that went on for ever … And he said: 'This is why we're lucky we're actors.' All I can tell you is that it was far more beautiful in real life than it was on film.'
So, despite all his anxieties, the stress and the pressure, was his career a fulfilling one? 'Absolutely!' he says. 'I've been very, very lucky.' And he's certainly not going to worry about his legacy. 'No, it's silly. Really, the point of a movie is you go and you sit and you watch a story. It's not about Brad's career – or somebody else's.'