May the Voice Be With You
With Mark Hamill voicing Chucky in the ‘Child’s Play’ reboot, we pay tribute to the ‘Star Wars’ icon’s stellar voice-acting careerMay the Voice Be With You
With Mark Hamill voicing Chucky in the ‘Child’s Play’ reboot, we pay tribute to the ‘Star Wars’ icon’s stellar voice-acting career
At the end of shooting Child’s Play, Lars Klevberg wrote Mark Hamill a letter. Though production had wrapped, the director still hadn’t cast someone to voice his Chucky. He was convinced that the Star Wars icon would be the perfect person to bring the ginger-haired killer doll to life. After all, Luke Skywalker is far from the only memorable character Hamill has played. But if you’re not a fan of animation or video games, you may not know it.
Hamill is one of the best, most prolific voice actors in the world. Over the past five decades, he’s had hundreds of roles in the field. In fact, he’s spent far more time on screen as a cartoon supervillain than as a Jedi.
“So I said, ‘I think we should reach out to Mark Hamill,’” recalled Klevberg, whose reboot hits theaters on Friday. “And everybody was like, ‘Ooh, that’s a great idea.’” The Norwegian filmmaker calmly waited for Hamill to turn him down. So Klevberg was shocked when the actor called to say that he was interested in the part.
“When he signed on to do it, he watched all the Child’s Play movies and the Chucky movies back-to-back in one night,” the director said. “He was just really into it.”
That may seem like an extreme step to have taken—over the course of seven installments, Don Mancini’s 31-year-old horror franchise goes from every kid’s worst nightmare to an unabashedly campy slashfest—but Hamill wasn’t about to give a half-assed effort. He takes all of his voice roles seriously, even one that requires him to personify a violent, quip-spewing toy that “Mean” Gene Okerlund once interviewed as part of a promotion on WCW Monday Nitro.
In truth, Chucky 2.0 is a bit different than his previous incarnation. A voodoo-practicing serial killer, voiced by a cackling, Jack Torrance–channeling Brad Dourif, originally inhabited him. (Separate from the new movie, there’s also somehow a Chucky-centered television series in the works and drama between the creators of the two remakes.) Updated for 2019, this Chucky is an interactive, artificial intelligence–powered animatronic doll that, due to some human-made alterations, gradually breaks very bad.
During the recording process Hamill quickly nailed down Chucky’s voice, which changes as the character grows more evil. “He had the ability to pitch down his voice so it became more menacing,” Klevberg said. Hamill’s voice, the director added, “is his greatest tool.”
The actor has been flexing his vocal muscles since he was a teenager imitating popular cartoon characters. (As a recent guest on The Late Late Show With James Corden, Hamill told a story about getting fired from his job at Jack in the Box for doing the voice of the chain’s clown mascot over the drive-through speaker.) His break came when he was cast in Hanna-Barbera’s animated spinoff of I Dream of Jeannie. In it, he essentially plays the role that Larry Hagman made famous. The major difference is that in the Saturday morning cartoon, the character is a high school surfer dude. Premiering in September 1973, the show lasted only 16 episodes. But to Hamill, voice acting remained enticing.
“It’s the ultimate character actor’s dream because the character actor disappears into his role,” he said this month in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes.
Post Star Wars, Hamill could no longer disappear into live-action roles. Voice acting allowed him to be a character actor again. It took a while, however, for him to find a part good enough to truly take advantage of his talents. One finally emerged in the early 1990s, during the development of Batman: The Animated Series. Hamill has said that he told his agent that he’d be up for playing one of the comic’s lesser-known villains. But when Tim Curry dropped out, reportedly due to him having bronchitis, Hamill was cast as the Joker.
It was an intimidating job. This was only a few years after the release of Tim Burton’s Batman, a blockbuster in which Jack Nicholson’s Joker steals all of his scenes. Still, Hamill managed to make his Joker unique. In 2017, he told The Hollywood Reporter that while he was playing the title role in the stage version of Amadeus, he taught himself to laugh in a variety of ways. As the Joker, he put that skill to work.
“In animation, there’s an anonymity involved,” Hamill told The AV Club in 2011. “Since they can’t see you, you’re liberated to make much bolder choices than you would make if you were on camera. And there’s a certain satisfaction—not only because I was a comic book fan—that it turned out so well, but it was so diametrically opposed to what I had become famous for, which was this iconic virtue.”
Batman: The Animated Series, one of the best adaptations of the franchise ever made, aired on Fox from 1992 to 1995. On Christmas Day in 1993, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm hit theaters. Made by the same team that produced the animated show, the noirish full-length feature grossed slightly less than its $6 million budget. These days, though, it’s a cult classic.
Since the ’90s, Hamill has reprised his role as the Joker many times over in movies, TV shows, and video games. The character also opened up the world of animation to him. He’s popped up as a regular in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, The Incredible Hulk, Wing Commander Academy, Zorro, and The Woody Woodpecker Show. Another role as an iconic villain came along in the mid-2000s, when he joined the cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the beloved animated series, which aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, he infuses burning intensity into the powerful Firelord Ozai.
Then there’s his dozens of one-off animated appearances. In an episode of The Simpsons, he plays himself playing Luke Skywalker playing Nathan Detroit in a low-rent production of Guys and Dolls. (“This is a conceptual nightmare!” he laments at one point.) In an episode of Family Guy, he plays both Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. And in an episode of The Boondocks, he plays a weed dealer named Grant.
In 2017, months before the release of The Last Jedi, Hamill’s two acting mediums collided in Brigsby Bear. In Kyle Mooney’s film, he plays a deranged toy maker who creates a children’s program for an audience of one: the son who he’s sequestered in a bunker well into adulthood. (Hamill also voices the costumed characters in the show-within-a movie.)
Chucky, it turns out, was right in Hamill’s wheelhouse. But even after saying yes to Klevberg, after years and years of standout voice roles, he still apparently had to fight off a bout of imposter syndrome. Luke Skywalker casts a long shadow.
“When I agreed to it, and it sunk in that they wanted me to do this, I felt intimidation like I hadn’t felt since I did the Joker,” he told Den of Geek. “I thought, when I auditioned for the Joker, there’s no way they’re going to cast this icon of virtue, Luke Skywalker, as the Joker. Forget about it. So I had no performance anxiety because I knew they couldn’t hire me. It’s only when they hired me that I really thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t do this because so many people have expectations of what he’s supposed to sound like.’”
His worries eventually faded. And now he’s the new Chucky. For the makers of Child’s Play, that’s a good thing. If there’s anyone whose presence could convince you to leave your house to see the reboot in the theater, it’s Mark Hamill.
