Before Child’s Play director Tom Holland settled on Brad Dourif as Chucky’s voice, he gave Arrested Development actress Jessica Walter the chance to play the part. “I thought Jessica was absolutely brilliant in Play Misty for Me, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to try a woman’s voice behind Chucky? Let’s see how that works,’” Holland told the New York Post following Walter’s death in 2021. “So I had her in, and she voiced him, and she was terrific,” Holland continued. “But when I looked at it in a preview situation, it just didn’t work with the character, because the doll was obviously a boy.” According to screenwriter Don Mancini, Holland was inspired to try for a female Chucky as he knew the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist was performed by a woman (Mercedes McCambridge).Holland said that McCambridge made him realize it could be done, but McCambridge was tougher than Walter, who didn’t have the same “masculine, [mean] presence.” Ultimately, Holland explained that Walter was “too feminine and too much a sweet, sweet lady to make this foul-mouthed male character believable. She was just too damn nice!” Test audiences agreed, and Dourif ended up voicing Chucky.As for whether a director’s cut featuring Walter is possible in the future, Holland doesn’t seem to think so. If he’s to be believed, the original audio tracks are long gone. However, Mancini claims otherwise. As he tells it, they’ve been locked up in a vault somewhere as “a public service”—in his opinion, Walter’s performance “didn’t work at all.”The post Chucky Was Almost Voiced by a Famous Sitcom Actress. Here’s Why It Didn’t Happen. appeared first on VICE.