Comic Con France 2025 - Chucky panel with Brad and Fiona Dourif скачать в хорошем качестве

Comic Con France 2025 - Chucky panel with Brad and Fiona Dourif

Villepinte, Parc des Expositions, April 13 2025 On April 13, 2025, at the Main Stage of Comic Con France, a quiet but deeply resonant moment took place—one that didn’t rely on spectacle or theatrical announcements, but rather on history, nuance, and personal legacy. The panel featuring Brad Dourif and his daughter Fiona Dourif was less an event meant to thrill and more an invitation to reflect on decades of horror cinema shaped by one of its most enduring and unlikely icons: Chucky. The discussion, grounded and introspective, offered fans a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a franchise that has quietly evolved from slasher curiosity to multigenerational mythos, all while remaining inextricably linked to a single family. What emerged was not only a shared appreciation for craft and character, but also the subtle complexity of a father and daughter navigating a career built around a fictional killer with a disturbingly human voice. Brad Dourif, who turned 75 this year, returned to Comic Con with the same reserved demeanor that has long characterized his off-screen presence. Best known outside the franchise for his Academy Award-nominated role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his collaborations with auteurs like David Lynch and Werner Herzog, and his Emmy-nominated performance in Deadwood, Dourif has never appeared particularly interested in celebrity. His association with Chucky, a role he has voiced since the original Child’s Play in 1988, is something he regards with a combination of pragmatism and enduring loyalty. During the panel, he made it clear—without theatrical sentiment—that his decision to stay with the franchise, even after announcing his retirement from acting in 2024, has everything to do with two people: Don Mancini, Chucky’s creator, and Fiona, his daughter. That choice—personal rather than professional—says more about his relationship to the character than any behind-the-scenes anecdote ever could. Fiona Dourif’s perspective offered a complementary counterpoint—less nostalgic, more contemporary, but just as grounded. Having joined the franchise in Curse of Chucky (2013), she has played a central role in its revitalization over the past decade, not only as Nica Pierce, a character whose arc has deepened the psychological dimension of the series, but also in more complex narrative functions, including portraying a young Charles Lee Ray in flashback sequences during the Chucky television series. The dynamic of playing scenes where her character is tormented by a doll voiced by her real-life father adds an additional, layered sense of unease—something she discussed with understated honesty rather than embellishment. Her presence has helped reshape the series into something far more fluid and multifaceted than its early entries suggested, though she was careful not to overstate her impact. Instead, she emphasized the evolution of the character-driven storytelling and the growing emotional resonance of a franchise that once thrived on shock value alone. The conversation also explored the technical and creative evolution of Chucky himself—from the intricate puppeteering of the early films, which required teams of nine operators to manipulate the doll’s mouth, limbs, and facial expressions, to the use of digital effects and animatronics in later installments. Brad recalled how the physicality of early productions contributed to the doll’s unsettling realism, something he feels has been partially lost in the transition to modern techniques. Fiona noted the challenges of acting opposite the newer iterations of the character, where practical effects and post-production sometimes create a disconnect from performance. These reflections were presented not as critiques, but as thoughtful observations on how the industry has changed over the years, and what has been gained or lost in the process. There was also, inevitably, discussion of the Chucky television series, which ran from 2021 through 2024. The series, while lighter in tone at times, managed to build on the existing mythology in surprisingly grounded ways—introducing new adolescent characters while continuing the arcs of legacy ones, including both Fiona’s Nica and Alex Vincent’s Andy Barclay. The series also leaned into themes such as identity, trauma, and generational violence, suggesting that beneath the absurdity of its premise, Chucky had more to say than its early films may have implied. Fiona’s dual performance—playing both Nica and the younger Charles Lee Ray—was a particularly striking example of how the franchise has learned to reference its own history in ways that are both narratively inventive and personally resonant. The decision to cast her as a younger version of her father’s character was not treated as a gimmick, but as a natural progression in a universe where identities blur and lineage matters.