With some changes to the doll and its motivations, the project was greenlit and a new franchise had begun.Ĭollider recently got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with Holland about what originally attracted him to the project, focusing on the drama more than the absurdity of a story about a killer doll, the biggest production challenges in bringing the doll to life, why he feels audiences connected to this story, figuring out the best approach to shooting Chucky himself, and how they even ended up having their young lead actor’s four-year-old sister fill in for Chucky during an important moment.Ĭollider: When you first heard about Child’s Play and this whole killer doll idea, what was your reaction to it? Did it seem silly? Did you feel like you could make it work? What convinced you that this crazy idea would actually work? When director Tom Holland (who also wrote and directed the original Fright Night and wrote 1984’s Cloak & Dagger) first had the project come his way, he wasn’t fully sold on it because he felt the young boy, Andy Barclay, was too unsympathetic. What started as a script by Don Mancini called Blood Buddy, about a doll that came with a pin so that you could become its blood buddy, turned into a tale about a struggling mother ( Catherine Hicks) unknowingly gifting her son ( Alex Vincent) a Good Guy doll that a killer ( Brad Dourif) on the verge of death used voodoo to transfer his soul into.
