Chucky Casts Cult Director John Waters to Play Iconic Child’s Play Figure

While the expansive lore of the Child’s Play franchise has been continuing in the Chucky TV series, extending the reign of terror of the titular doll, next year will see Part 2 of Season 3 feature cult director John Waters joining the cast. Entertainment Weekly confirmed that Waters will be playing Wendell Wilkins, the creator of the franchise’s Good Guys line of toys. In the original films, killer Charles Lee Ray performed a voodoo ritual that kept his spirit alive in the body of a pint-sized Good Guys doll that was purchased for Christmas, with Waters’ casting confirmed to be shedding insight into an overlooked corner of the franchise’s mythology. Stay tuned for details on the return of Season 3 of Chucky in 2024.

This isn’t Waters’ first foray into the Child’s Play franchise, as he previously appeared in 2004 as the photographer Pete Peters in Seed of Chucky.

Part of what has kept the franchise fresh and audiences invested in Chucky is how creator Don Mancini has gotten experimental, metatextual, and surreal with his self-reflexive storytelling. As compared to other horror franchises that remain relatively straightforward and linear in their storytelling, Chucky has allowed Mancini to explore the concept in frightening and hilarious ways, so we won’t be surprised if the upcoming episodes find a way to reference Waters’ previous role or even his own legacy as a filmmaker.

The most recent season of the SYFY and USA series split its debut into two parts due to the actors’ strike, though Mancini previously recalled how the hiatus after Episode 4 allowed for an organic opportunity to build more excitement about the rest of the season.

“Once we saw that the strike was coming, we put all of our resources and time into finishing the first four,” Mancini confirmed to ComicBook.com previously. “We really have almost finished five and six as well. But we literally [have] just like a day left to finish five and six. And then a few more weeks to do seven and eight. But we do have pieces of seven and eight already shot, as well. So, when [the strike] happened, Universal said, ‘Okay, well, this is what we can do.’ And fortuitously enough, the end of Episode 4 really did lend itself [to a hiatus], and that was just coincidence, because that was always what was going to happen at the end of Episode 4. And we knew that since that was the Halloween episode, as we do every year, we try to make the Halloween episode a little bit special. So it functions as a good cliffhanger because no one has ever seen Chucky with this particular dilemma before.” 

Stay tuned for updates on Chucky‘s return in 2024.

Are you looking forward to seeing Waters in the new season? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!