An Interview with Christine Elise: Chucky isn’t ‘Child’s Play’s’ Only Badass

Being a badass has less to do with possessing physical strength or toughness, and everything to do with speaking your mind and the ability to pick up anything and own it.

Christine Elise is a badass.

Not only has she starred as one of the most beloved characters in one of horror’s most beloved franchises as Kyle in Child’s Play 2, but had recurring roles on Beverly Hills, 90210 and ER. And that’s just in front of the camera. Elise is also an avid photographer, wrote, directed and starred in an award-winning short film that she later turned into a one of the most hilarious novels you’ll ever set eyes on, pens a food blog, and even has a YouTube channel that highlights her passion for food by sharing healthy and delicious vegan recipes. And did we mention her triumphant, post-credits return as Kyle in Cult of Chucky?

Horror Geek Life caught up with Elise last Wednesday, and the outspoken badass didn’t disappoint, offering candid takes on a proposed Child’s Play reboot and the proposed Child’s Play TV series.

Horror Geek Life: Child’s Play 2 was your first studio film, so how did that role come about?

Christine Elise: The standard way work comes for most actors that are starting out, I had an agent that submitted me, they had me come in for an audition, I auditioned, and after a couple of auditions I got the part. I’ve never had an audition process take more than two, but I have never done gigantic, blockbuster stuff where there’s that much deliberation going on. I read for it, they actually didn’t cast me right away, it should have just been one audition and been cast, but they didn’t find the girl in the first pass, so they decided to bring back girls that they thought were near-misses the first time. I went back in a second time and had just done an episode of 21 Jump Street and was actively shooting an episode of the old Baywatch, so I had to go into the audition before I went to work on Baywatch. I was kind of in a hurry and impatient, and actors in general have a lot more confidence when they’re auditioning if they’re actually currently working, and I think that reality made a little difference in my attitude in the room and I think that’s why I got the job.

HGL: You’ve often noted that China Beach was your finest experience as an actor, but there has to be a behind the scenes story from your time under the Child’s Play umbrella that makes you laugh or smile whenever you think about it.

CE: No. I actually hate that question because it’s a question that people always ask, every actor gets asked that about every single project. First of all, it was 1989 (chuckles), so that’s more than half my lifetime ago, and so no, I never have funny stories to share. Typically, if I think the story’s funny then it’s probably too personal to share, and a lot of stories are kind of like, you had to be there for it to be funny.

So I don’t have any, but one experience that I like to talk about on that set that’s unusual for people, that they would never guess, is that Alex (Vincent) was seven years old and his hours were restricted by child labor laws, he could only work a certain amount of hours and he had to go in to his tutor and go home. And then Chucky was run by nine puppeteers that were all union actors, as I was and Alex too, but Alex is one, I’m one and Chucky is nine. So when I shot scenes with Alex and Chucky, what we would do is they’d shoot the establishing shot, which is the big, wide shot of everything that happens for the whole scene so that the audience has some sense of the geography of the location, so when you move in for close-ups, you know where they are and where they’re positioned in the room, et cetera. So I do the wide shots and then we move in and shoot all of Alex’s close-up stuff first and then send him home, because he had the shortest work day, and then we’d shoot all of Chucky’s stuff because Chucky was so much more expensive to have on-set than I was. So they’d shoot Chucky’s stuff, then send Chucky and the puppeteers home, and then I would do all of my close-up work with just a blue piece of tape on a stand, “That blue tape is Alex and that red tape over there is Chucky. Go.” So I was acting, almost, in a vacuum. And I really wasn’t an experienced actor either, so it was challenging.

People always ask “Was it harder to work with a doll?” or “What’s it like working with a doll rather than a human being?” and that is pretty much the same, it’s just all acting. The stuff that’s happening in the scenes, for the most part, isn’t real for you at all anyway. Being chased by a murderous doll or having to do a love scene with somebody you’re not in love with, it’s all acting, it’s all just pretend. So those things are equally easy or difficult depending, but acting with neither — no actor and no doll, just pieces of tape — that was actually challenging.

HGL: Standing in the snow in Winnipeg, what was going through your mind just before hearing Don Mancini yell “Action!” for your end credits scene in Cult of Chucky, 27 years after Child’s Play 2?

CE: It was 40-below and 3 o’clock in the morning, so I was thinking, “I’m fucking freezing and I’m fuckin’ (chuckles) exhausted.” It’s really fucking cold and I knew it had been a long day and Don was really exhausted, and I found out after the fact that they almost didn’t shoot it. I flew out there and was in Winnipeg for most of a week to just do that one line in the movie for the after the credits thing, and it had gotten so late in the day that the producers were saying let’s just pull it, let’s just not shoot, let’s just blow it off and not do it. So thank God Don understood how important it was to re-introduce my character to the franchise the way they did with Alex’s character (after the credits for Curse of Chucky), so thank God I didn’t know they were thinkin’ of pullin’ the plug ’cause I probably would have choked. I probably would have had three takes and fucked them up and (laughs) they wouldn’t have used it anyway.

HGL: How long had your return to the fold been in the works, and obviously before you knew they might cut it, how difficult was that to keep quiet about such an exciting secret?

CE: It was brutal. For a year I had to keep it a secret. I get asked about my return to the franchise constantly and I always have been asked about it. I still get asked about it, because even people who saw Cult, if they didn’t see Cult on an unrated version of the Blu-ray, they didn’t see my scene. So many, many people who saw Cult don’t know I make a return in it. So even people who have seen all seven Chucky movies still ask me “When are you gonna come back?” and are surprised to hear me say “Yeah, I already have.”

But it was especially difficult to keep the secret because once Andy had his post-credits return in Curse, everyone anticipated there’d be another return character in Cult, and I can tell you from having done horror conventions for the last seven years, that I would say if there was a vote of all Chucky fans on what their favorite Chucky film was of the entire franchise, I would say 75 percent of people say Child’s Play 2. For so many people, it was the first horror movie they ever saw and I think it’s popular with people because most people saw it when they were very young and I think the idea of this teenage girl and this little boy on their own fighting Chucky, and the girl taking care of the little boy, I think that really appealed to little kids’ sensibilities. That one has a real special place in many Chucky fans’ hearts.

Because Child’s Play 2 is so popular within the franchise I think a lot of people were really invested that it would be Kyle that came back. So I got asked every single day, and I wasn’t allowed to say that I was and I wasn’t allowed to say that I wasn’t, I was like, “Don, what’s left?” “Oh, ya know, just roll your eyes and be coy.” First of all, it’s a question on Facebook (laughs), it’s a direct message or it’s in a thread somewhere, my facial expression’s not part of the math. And also it’s that that just doesn’t fly, people press harder with that kind of an answer, so I would say things like “We shot multiple endings, I don’t know which one they’re gonna go with” and had to get creative with what I said or just outright ignored the question sometimes.

HGL: From the outside looking in, the Child’s Play universe gives off the vibe of a close-knit family, can you talk about your relationship with Mancini and how he holds that family together after all this time?

CE: I stayed friends with Don after the second one, so I was friends with him through the intervening years between 2 and Cult, and we have friends outside of this franchise in real life, in common. And I’m actually friends with Jennifer Tilly in real life, I knew Jennifer before she got the part in Bride, and she actually asked me whether she should do Bride or not. There’s that element of Los Angeles being a small town, so just knowing people socially kept the family alive, too.

I got back in touch with Alex in 2011 when I started doing conventions, and Alex feels like my real little brother, and he was a baby when Don met him and Don’s known Alex his entire life, Alex was six when he did the first film. So Alex’s earliest memories involve Chucky and the cast and crew of those films, so that’s sort of family for him, too. And then Don literally cast Brad Dourif’s daughter (Fiona) in Curse and in Cult, and Kevin Yagher, who designed the first Chucky and Freddy Krueger and the Cryptkeeper, married Catherine Hicks, who was the mom in the first one. So there’s multiple layers of family, from literal family, husband and wife, father and daughter, faux movie family like me and Alex, and then sort of extended chosen family, which I think most of us are to each other.

HGL: As someone who is part of the inner circle of a franchise that is alive and well 30 years after it began, what are your thoughts about reports of a potential reboot of Child’s Play?

CE: I think it’s an unbelievably huge dick move. I think it’s a douche move absolutely. I don’t know why they would fuck with a healthy franchise. To make a competing franchise with an existing, and like you said healthy, robust franchise is super douchey. And nobody from the original franchise is involved, they’re not gonna have Brad Dourif, they’re not gonna have Don, and they’re not gonna have any of us.

I think the doll is going to be an artificial intelligence doll that goes haywire, so it’s not going to have the whole element of the serial killer possessing it, et cetera, so it’s not going to be, really, a Chucky film. So I don’t know why they’re just taking the title and stealing it and mucking up the waters. It’s especially douchey when you know that Don is developing a TV series and going back to using the title Child’s Play, not Bride of, Seed of, Curse of, Cult of Chucky, it’s going back to the Child’s Play name and it’s deep into development. So this MGM project could have, it hasn’t but it could have, really, easily derailed the TV show project, which would be devastating, because fingers crossed it happens and fingers crossed I’m involved in it, as much as I would like to be. It’s an opportunity here where Don can further a story he’s been telling for 30 years, but rather than tell it in 90-minute segments every three years or more, he can tell 10 hours of story in 10 weeks, he can get that much more story ahead. And if you’ve seen Cult and you see how Cult ends, you know how rich in story it is, there’s so many doors open now, and to so insensitively threaten the Don Mancini empire I think, is fucked up.

HGL: That’s one of the most satisfying answers I’ve ever gotten to any question I’ve ever asked. Now, it’s one of our favorite questions, be it at a convention, through the mail, or a chance encounter on the street, what is the strangest request you’ve ever received from a fan?

CE: The strangest things that happen to me are actually by people that don’t even know I’m an actor. It’s gross, horny guys from, like, Nigeria or India — very often they’re Indian — wherever they’re from, usually their English is very broken, or it’s these 60-year old white guys from Wisconsin direct messaging me on Facebook or on Instagram and wanting to chat and, I guess, lead to something, whether it’s sex talking or…I don’t know what they fuckin’ want, but it’s so gross!

It’s just horny guys and they ask things like, “Where are you from? What to you do? How old are you?” so it’s clear that they’re not reaching out to me because they think I’m famous or they liked me in some project, they have no fuckin’ idea! They just have ascertained there’s a good chance I have a vagina and if they reach out there’s some possibility they might get access to it. That is the freakiest thing to me, and I just don’t understand why these guys do it. They are universally repellent by the way. It’s not like Idris Elba’s doing this or some hot guy, it’s always some gross guy, not that I would respond if it was an attractive guy, but it just never fuckin’ ends! (Chuckles) It’s always somebody super gross living in a basement. So that’s the weirdest thing, ’cause I just don’t understand how that world works. I can’t imagine these guys ever get a girl to take the bait, but they must, or they wouldn’t keep trying.

Beyond that, this past weekend (August 3-5) I did a convention in Chicago and a man walked up to my table on Sunday and said, “Okay, tell me. (Pause) Tell me.” And I go, “Tell you what?” He goes “Everything.” His question was tell me everything. I don’t even know where to go with that, that’s wildly broad. First of all, there isn’t time to tell you everything so maybe we should narrow it down to what you’re interested in. And then the questions he asked were like “Where are you from?” and “When did you move to L.A.?” like really generic questions that had nothing to do with why he would be at a horror convention or why he’d be standing in front of my table (chuckles).

And I’ve gotten a handful of creepy letters, I get a lot of people wanting me to get them into Chucky movies, which is just not possible. People are under the impression that they can live in Wyoming and be a contractor and just get gifted a job in a Chucky movie ’cause they want one. The answer is how to get a job in a Chucky movie is become an actor (chuckles) Be an actor for a while, and then do what everyone else who’s in it did, which is audition. The other thing people think that’s wildly inaccurate is that I live immersed in Chucky, and I that have a room dedicated to Chucky nostalgia and paraphernalia and collectibles. More bizarrely, everybody thinks that I’ve got a real Chucky doll from any of the movies, which I haven’t. Those dolls, I think somebody at the convention in Chicago had a real one, a screen-used one from Cult, I think he sold it for $14,000. And Chucky from [Child’s Play] is worth about $50,000. Universal owns those dolls and they don’t give them away (chuckles). I don’t have any props from any job I’ve ever done. You don’t walk away with props, they belong to the property department or to the production company, they’re not things that you can just take, which is a really wild misconception that people have, that you can just have stuff.

A lot of the clothing that I wear in projects I have, because I wore my own clothing, but it’s common for wardrobe departments to have you bring in a bunch of your own stuff that’s suitable for the character because it’s typically going to fit you better, and it won’t cost the production for you to use your stuff, and also it’s more unique. That black leather hat that I wear in Child’s Play 2, I owned that hat before I was ever even an actor, I wore it on the audition and they had me wear it in the movie. I wore it in on the audition for 90210, and they had me wear it in 90210, I wore it on the audition for 21 Jump Street and I wore it in 21 Jump Street, and I have that hat still. But I owned that hat when I became an actor, I didn’t get to keep the hat from a set. The only thing I’ve ever gotten from sets is wardrobe. Sometimes they’ll say “You can have that when the movie’s over,” or “you can buy it for a low price,” but I don’t have a house immersed in Chucky stuff. In fact, I got my first Chucky doll of any merit, a fan wrote me recently and said “I’ll give you this Chucky doll if you send me signed X, Y, Z,” so it’s a Child’s Play 2 doll, a vintage Child’s Play 2 doll, but it’s a marketed one, it was a retail one that I think is worth about $150 right now. It was super generous of that fan to give it to me, and I kind of only accepted the offer because I don’t have a Chucky (chuckles), and everybody thinks I do, so I had to break that truth.

HGL: Let’s talk about Bathing & the Single Girl, a short film you wrote, directed and starred in that won more than 20 awards. Obviously drawn from some of your own experiences, talk about how that went from idea to full-fledged success?

CE: I live in Hollywood, and there’s a theatre at the bottom of my hill called the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, sort of a comedy and improv theatre. About ten years ago I started going to a show that would run every month or two called Four Stories and a Cover, there were four people reading true life comic essays about themselves, 2,000 words or so, and four people would read a story about themselves and we’d all laugh, and a fifth person would do a funny cover song, so it was four stories and a cover.

My friend is also a writer, she and I used to go and she said, “Let’s challenge each other. Let’s both submit a story to this thing and we’ll both do it,” so I did and she didn’t, and my story was the story that is the short film. So on the night that I read it they go “We need a title of your story,” and spur of the moment I was like “Bathing and the Single Girl,” so that’s how that title happened, it was just not thought out at all. But I thought that I liked it because it doesn’t give anything away and it might make people think it’s a story about hygiene (chuckles), “Single women need to bathe more if they don’t want to be single.” So I did it and it went well and my friends that were there were like “Oh, it’s so funny, you should have recorded it” because I’ve not done a lot of comedy professionally and my agents don’t think I’m funny, and when you want to audition for something in comedy the casting people always say “Send me a reel. Send me something she’s done that’s funny,” and so “You should have recorded it, then you’d have proof!” So I did it again at a different theatre here called Naked Angels. I recorded it and I posted that recording on Facebook and a friend of mine, who’s a commercial director of photography and does L’Oreal and Brek ads saw the footage and said “The story’s really funny but the footage is fuckin’ ugly. I’ll shoot it for you for nothing if you let me direct it.” So I’m like “Okay.” So I didn’t change the wording of the piece at all, and like I said, it was written to be read to a live audience so it’s not awkward to address the audience when you’re standing in front of one in real life. But I wanted to get the thing shot so quickly and I didn’t change the wording at all, and I have the character be in a cabaret at an open mic thing like I really did. It’s verbatim what I read on the stage, and we shot all one take, not one take but one set-up, so me in one dress, same hair, same background, did the whole thing.

And 10 minutes is a long time, it was too static for 10 minutes so he came two more days over the course of a couple of months to shoot inserts and then he got bored, and was like “I’m tired of this” and he had ideas of having me eat a TV dinner by myself and doing things that were sort of sad and pathetic, which is not the point of the piece, the piece is sort of a female power piece, not like oh-poor-me-I’m-single-why-don’t-men-love-me, that’s not what the piece is about. So he’s like “Fuck it, I don’t care. You can have the footage, I’m outta here,” so I did three more days of shooting over the course of a year, breaking it up and pacing it up so that it would be more engaging to watch and people wouldn’t drift off and get distracted. And I’m proud of it, that I managed to do that considering that it’s a 10-minute monologue, I think it does hold peoples’ attention pretty well. I’ll just offer it that after two years doing film festivals with it, I did like 100 film festivals with it, somebody saw it and said “Oh, that’s really funny. If you can come up with more stories like that and be funny in that vein more, you should write a novel.” So I did, I wrote a novel called Bathing & the Single Girl, which remains my greatest achievement in life.

HGL: And then you built on that success and expanded the story into a novel as you said. Was it all scary to go from a 10-minute short to a full-fledged, 300-plus-page novel?

CE: First of all, I’ve always been a writer, I had a 400-page, unfinished novel for 10 years before the suggestion to write this one was made, and it’s a totally different book, it’s a dark, dark dramatic book, it’s not a funny book at all. When I was told to write this, actually the guy who told me to write it, he’s a manager, and his best friend is Joan Collins, and he said, “If you can write a novel, I can get you a three-book deal,” and that was super motivating to me. If I could wave a magic wand and be anything in the world, what would I be? I would be a critically acclaimed, very successful author, that’s the thing I have the most respect for. Except for people saving babies from cancer and burns, aside from being a medical person, which is ultimately the most noble because you’re saving peoples’ lives, that just doesn’t interest me and I don’t have the stomach for blood and gore. But in the art world, writing I think is the most challenging because it’s so singular and so solo and such a lonely effort, and it’s not a collaboration.

I was super motivated by a three-book deal, because I wrote three episodes of 90210, so I’ve always dabbled and aspired to this, so when it was suggested I was completely into it, but I had no fuckin’ idea where I was going to go with it, but I was just so eager to get it done that I thought of a launching point in the car driving home from the meeting talking to my mother. “Okay, I’m going to have it start like this and launch in this direction,” which I did, and I wrote it stream of consciousness style, and I wrote it in eight weeks. I had a 2,000 word a day goal, which is about five pages a day, which is a lot, it’s a pretty aggressive goal. I wrote from 9 to 5 seven days a week and I got it done in eight weeks. Then I Googled “most powerful literary agents in New York” and I submitted it to the top ten.

One of them said yes, a company called Dystel & Goderich in New York, they represented one of [Barack] Obama’s books, a super legit literary agency. They took it on, and there was no editing, no nothing, we didn’t tweak it at all, just as I wrote it, came out of my brain, there it is on the paper, it’s done, let’s try to sell it. The feedback we got was that everyone said it was funny, they thought I could write, they were the most glowing rejection letters ever. “Oh my God, she’s so funny, she’s a really talented writer. Not for us. (chuckles)” It was like “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read. Not for us.”

The book was initially set up and felt like a romantic comedy in the beginning, where this girl doesn’t want to be single, basically, and made a pact with her male friend that if they’re not married by 40, they marry each other kind of a thing, which is a romantic comedy set-up and the feedback was “It starts like that, but it ends up getting very dark.” So people who enjoy a romantic comedy are not going to enjoy how the book ends, or where it goes ultimately, and people that would enjoy where the book goes are not going to get there because they’re not going to like the romantic comedy set-up, and they’re going to be turned off by that and put the book down. So you need to re-write it and you need to pick whether you want to go more mainstream or go darker.” So I went darker and I took the romantic comedy beginning out, and I re-wrote probably 50 percent of it over the course of another two months.

We tried to sell it, and got more unbelievably glowing rejections letters from all the biggest publishing houses in New York, and the bottom line is comedy is so subjective, it’s very difficult to anticipate or to predict what other people will find funny. So unless you are Amy Poehler or Tina Fey or Jerry Seinfeld, it’s almost impossible to get a comedy book deal. Amy Schumer can get one, Christine Elise cannot, I don’t have an established comedy following.

So it’s kind of like, I have a cooking channel and I’ve had a cooking blog for six years and everyone thinks I should write a cook book, but the cook book world is just as competitive. You need to be either a famous chef like Gordon Ramsay or somebody who’s from the Food Channel or the Cooking Channel, those people have gigantic followings, so I ended up having to self-publish the book.

HGL: You’d talked about a book you had worked on in the past, a darker story. Are you working at all continuing with that or something else for a second novel? 

CE: I’m not doing it right now. The other book is about a girl who’s about 9-to-11-years old who’s living with an alcoholic parent and watching them descend into madness. The feedback that I’ve gotten on the draft of that is that nobody wants to read a book about a prepubescent girl except other prepubescent girls, and the book is too dark for that crowd. So I’ve basically written another book that doesn’t have an audience. So I’m not super psyched to write another book that I have to self-publish. As far as a continuation of the Bathing book, I would love to, but when you’re writing something you can’t force it. When that came out, it was the right time and the right topic, and I was in the right place and it just happened. Right now, I really would like to get my acting career on better footing than it currently is, and that’s where my focus is right now.

HGL: Can we talk about Delightful-Delicious-Delovely? You obviously have a passion for cooking, with a blog and a YouTube channel, where did all that come from? 

CE: I love to eat, I’ve always loved to cook, and I enjoy photography. I would cook these things and photograph them and post them on Facebook, and people would be like “That’s beautiful. What is it? I wish I had that recipe.” After years of that I was like, “I should just fuckin’ make a blog so they can have the fuckin’ recipes,” so I did.

I’m a vegetarian, I was pescatarian, which means eating fish as well as everything else vegetarians eat, for 30 years, so when I started the blog it was pescatarian and then I gave up fish a couple of years ago so it became vegetarian, and then in the last two years or so I’ve transitioned into vegan eating.

The channel’s a year-and-a-half old. After about five years of doing the blog and the blog just felt stagnant, like I’d done everything with it and reached the audience that I could, I needed to step it up and do something else, I was basically bored with the blog. I just woke up one day and said “I’m doin’ a channel!” If you watch the first couple of episodes, I didn’t have a proper camera, I didn’t have a mic, I didn’t know which direction to shoot initially, the first step and all the other ones, it isn’t until Episode 13 or so that I got the technical shit together.

Same with the blog, the blog was like “What are you going to do today?” and I’m like “I think I’m going to start a blog,” and I did. Same thing with the channel, I just woke up and I was like “Fuck it, I’m gonna do a channel.” Considering that I have to eat all the food that I make too, it’s entirely a one-man show, I do everything — I shoot it, I edit it, I make the food, I photograph the food, and I eat the food — it’s just me. I haven’t done it in a month, though. I’ve taken a month off, which is the first month I’ve taken off, I haven’t taken a week off even since I started it, but because I live in Hollywood and it’s been 100 to 110 degrees for the past month and I don’t have air conditioning, so cooking in my kitchen is brutal. And then my office is the hottest room in the house so editing it together and posting it would be like sitting and doing that in an oven, but by the end of the week I’ll have a new episode.

HGL: Mancini offered another teaser recently, about a Child’s Play television series, and if fans of the franchise know one thing, it’s that the saga maintains continuity, so will we be seeing Kyle and Andy teaming to battle the demonic doll or his current vehicle, Nica in that series or another film?

CE: Fiona knows more than anybody because she’s best friends with Don, so I’m sure he’s confided much more in her than he has either Alex or myself, but as an actor you don’t believe a job is going to happen until you’re on a set and they say “Action” for the first time. Until an actual job is offered to you no job is real.

I don’t have any official word that me or Alex, or even Fiona for that matter are going to be in it, I can’t imagine how we wouldn’t be, though, it doesn’t make any sense. Don himself says, “I want the show to pick up where the movie left off,” and [Cult of Chucky] left off with Fiona possessed by her father, basically, and Alex locked in a nut house, and me out in the cabin torturing Chucky, so I don’t know how you leave those threads, any of those threads hanging.

Potentially they could do it if it was just another feature and they could just skip ahead before coming back to those story lines, but with a 10-hour series there’s just no way. I don’t know how much Alex and I or Fiona will be in it. Initially I was afraid it was going to be something like an anthology series, separate entirely from the franchise and just Twilight Zone style, tell 10 totally free-standing Chucky stories with all new people, but I’m getting the impression that it’s not that, though, it’s going to be a continuation of the last feature. Which, again, I don’t have a contract in front of me, and I haven’t heard anything yet, but I don’t know how they can move forward and not have all of us involved. Fingers crossed, I fuckin’ wanna be.