On this page, I wanted to let him speak.

I know the danger to remove a quotation of its context, but if I selected with other fans exactly these passages it is that they marked me, because they seemed to raise a veil on his life,:the way he sees his profession in which fold of his childhood or of his personality he draws to animate his characters.

"I know I'm not normal. I think as a kid I must have had some kind of attention-deficit disorder. Sometimes people are afraid of me, and I think, What? How can they be afraid of me?"
- But you know what's on the inside, I say. A devilish smile. "Yes. And they don't."

"When I was very young, I lived in a certain dream world. I was a very shy and withdrawn child. I had a difficult time adjusting to school and all that kind of stuff. The one power I had was the ability to create a different world."

"It's something in my eyes, a tension that I carry around. I can be sitting on a set, thinking about a ham sandwich, and people will think I'm immersed in deep thought. But I'm really not, I'm just thinking about a ham sandwich."

I think I have an obsessive quality to my personality. What makes things scary is you can't argue with obsession. If you have an obsessive personality, there is not a whole lot I can do about it. If I let it get the best of me, than it REALLY can be scary. We all have an edge. We all are floating our psyche on top with a great ocean underneath. It is important to understand this so you can deal with it

My father died when I was 3, but apparently he was very into the "Macabre". There were lots of scary pictures and stuff that was around. That may of been an influence. I was very, very into Halloween. I loved Edgar Allan Poe when I was a kid. I knew all his stories. Science Fiction not so much, but horror yes. I liked the scary, the unknown! And didn't you have the big house down the block that was abandoned, where the axe murder took place when you were a kid? There were a couple on my block( he laughs at this). So, I grew up with that. I guess the 50's were just a more innnocentand different era. And all of that was much more implied and wonderful then it is now. Now it is so explicite, it has gotten to be a joke on itself. I mean you can't scare anybody anymore. All of horror is laughing at itself, which I guess is kind of fun.

 

. It somehow has a value, it makes it clear - for instance, playing Wormtongue, it makes it clear how tragic it is when people give in to fear. Instead of confronting something I am afraid I just give in to it, I'm pathetic.

For example, I'm a character actor. I'm never safe. I don't know where my next job is going to come from, I don't know where my next money is going to come from. I could walk around the house feeling terrified about, "I'll never work again," and I've done that. Or I could have a little faith that in time all of this is going to come around and I just do what I need to do and go about my business with a little bit of faith and some courage. And then teach that to the children that live with me. Those are the choices we all have.

 

Being Oscar-nomimated for Cuckoo's Nest threw Dourif into a tailspin. "It scared the shit out of me," he grimaces. "All that happened too soon for me, I think. Psychologically, I wasn't prepared for it. I was too young." He did attend the ceremony (he lost to George Burns), as he did the one held in honor of the British Academy wards. Even so, when he walked up on stage to accept the latter, he declined to give an acceptance speech.

As Dourif remembers it, the hoopla generated by his Oscar nod made him want to burrow deeper into himself. "I stayed in upstate New York and hid. I felt like it [the nomination] was a big mistake, that it wasn't me. Sooner or later I felt that everybody was going to find out that I wasn't deserving of it, that I couldn't act, and the bottom was going to fall out from under me. So I just hid from it."

Since you have began your acting career, you have played quite a few sinister characters. When you started to act was that the kind of characters you wanted to play?
- Of course not! I started out with the intentions of being the leading guy, the one who gets the girl and the money.
Do you feel you have been typecast at this point?
- Absolutely! That’s exactly what happened to me, no question about it.
Are you comfortable with that?
No, I’m fighting against it. I just happen to have a sense of humor about it at this point. I have to make a living, so I do it the best way I can. I would rather be paid a lot more money and get the girl.

I would much rather be a fabulously wealthy actor. But since I am not, the character parts are more interesting, gives much more diversity. Villains are great. If it wasn't for the devil, we wouldn't be here, would we?

"I've always been a character actor", and when asked if he wouldn't prefer more mainstream roles
, he quipped "All those fans, all that money, and all that success - who'd want that?!".

"I'm a total whore," he happily admits. "Give me a camera and a pay cheque and I'm there."

In a certain sense I'm deeply religious. There is something fundamentally spiritual about people, even atheists. We relate to something larger than ourselves. Everybody does in some way. People just express is differently. it's in your concept of God, no matter what it is -- even if you're an atheist, or reject the whole idea of God. But it's somewhere in the struggle around that idea that there's a lot of power in people's behavior. There's a lot of energy. You begin to see people really come alive.

I don’t believe in evil.” “I just don’t think that "evil" is (in the sense of existing.) I think…that "evil" is an invention that didn’t take place in the human consciousness until about 2,000 B.C., and really came into its own around the time of Christ. Before that…evil was not really a concept. I mean, it was really invented around that time. So I don’t agree with that kind of outlook. It’s become a way that we can look at people when we want to dehumanize them. It was not around in primitive mythologies and primitive cultures. They don’t know what evil is.”

So how can one prepare for the challenge of playing a character who is, by the commonly accepted definition, “evil”?

Dourif smiles again, shaking his head. “No, no, the answer is I can’t portray someone as “evil” because there’s no such thing. It doesn’t exist. It’s just this concept and nobody knows what it is. And "evil" is a judgment to give us some comfort. It just means that you’re not killing a person anymore; you can kill them because they’re "evil". And that’s all that means. Anybody can get to the point where they’re not a person anymore and you have no feeling about it, about them, and you can then kill them. And, I mean, I can play that. You know, if you want to pull a trigger on somebody and turn them into a piece of meat, then you pull that trigger and turn them into a piece of meat. And it’s okay to pull a trigger on a piece of meat.” Ironically, psychologists are nearly unanimous in ascribing exactly that mindset to how serial killers typically think of their victims.

Since you don’t have the life experience of being one of the devil’s minions or entering the body of a dead person, how do you work yourself into that emotional state?

BD: Yeah, but I do have an incredibly violent heart, and in that sense, I certainly am one of the devil’s minions aren’t I? You know, the great thing about being a villain, particularly in this culture, is that we love our villains, we’re really fascinated by evil. So, I mean, if you find all the evil inside you and you’re willing to express it, you can survive quite well in this business.

. Every person in the world is a prisoner of their own psychology, of their own law of movement. The habitual kind of idea that you have, that you don’t even think about. Eventually, it hems on you.

How would he introduce himself? “Oh, Lord. I don’t know. I’m shy in that kind of situation, so I’d probably say ‘here’s some stuff I did’ and don’t ask me what they are, cause I’m terrible with memory. What do I say? Hi, I’m Brad Dourif, I’m Chucky, I mean, what do you say?” He laughs. “I kill a lot of people?”