Jennifer Tilly is many things: an Oscar nominee, a horror icon , a poker champion , and, in her own words, “a runaway train.” Speaking from her Los Angeles home, Tilly is a whirlwind — funny, self-aware, prone to going off on a tangent or two — and it’s instantly clear why she’s been Hollywood’s go-to pick for outrageous , glamorous scene-stealers for over 30 years.
The actress is camp incarnate (“I put on red lipstick just for you,” she says at the top of our Zoom call) and she has never been given a more fitting vehicle for her talents than Tiffany Valentine, the hard-bitten sweetheart of everyone’s favorite serial-killer doll, Chucky . With her perfectly pitched coo and alluring aesthetic, no one could play Valentine but Tilly, and Seeds of Chucky , the 2004 sequel to Child’s Play , shrewdly embraced this fact by having the doll possess the body of a fictionalized Jennifer Tilly. She’s been playing a vampish, unhinged parody of herself ever since.
When Tilly got the call for season one of Chucky , Syfy’s riotous small-screen continuation of the Child’s Play series, she believed it was her farewell to the character. “I thought, I’m going to just put on my high-heeled Tiffany shoes one last time for the fans,” she says. “I didn’t see it as opening a door and plunging back into the Chucky world. I thought it was my last hurrah.”
Instead, Tilly returned for the currently airing second season in an expanded role that came to a delightful peak this week with an episode that features a party turned murder mystery centered around Tilly herself. To mark the occasion, Chucky creator Don Mancini enlisted Tilly’s Bound co-stars Gina Gershon and Joe Pantoliano, her sister Meg Tilly, and her dear friend and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Sutton Stracke, all playing heightened versions of themselves.
Do you take it as a compliment for this show to refer to you as a horror icon?
I love it. But Tiffany is very grandiose and delusional, and she starts getting herself confused with Jennifer […]
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