SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Final Destination,” the Season 3 finale of Syfy/USA Network’s “Chucky,” available to stream next day on Peacock.
For the first time in 20 years, Jennifer Tilly doesn’t have to refer to herself in the third person when talking about “Chucky.”
Since 1998’s “Bride of Chucky,” Tilly, 65, has been fluent in the ever-more-bizarre mythology of Don Mancini’s killer doll franchise. In that film, she played Tiffany, the human, serial-killing girlfriend of Chucky, who has her soul transported into a doll bride. She died at the end of the movie, but that didn’t stop Mancini from resurrecting her in 2004’s “Seed of Chucky,” when Tiffany’s soul is put into the body of her favorite actress, Jennifer Tilly. Ever since, Tilly has navigated the meta minefield of playing Tiffany in Jennifer Tilly drag.
But in the Season 3 finale of Syfy/USA Network’s continuation series “Chucky,” after two decades of playfully destroying Tilly’s career and reputation, Chucky warned his estranged wife that the world is never going to stop looking for the most-wanted actress in the world. So Tiffany finally exorcizes her soul from her human vessel, and puts it back in the plastic body of a doll, courtesy of the original dollmaker (played by camp king John Waters). As Tiffany presumably leaves behind the soulless corpse of her favorite actress and two-decade companion, it is a bittersweet moment for Tilly –– even though there is one thing she is rejoicing.
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“I have to say, I am a little relieved that 20 years of Tiffany in Jennifer Tilly’s body and making fun of her floundering career is over,” Tilly tells Variety. “I loved it. It was so funny and satirical, but I think we have taken it as far as we possibly could. And Don Mancini, in my 20-some years of knowing him, always knows when to leave a party. So I am really excited and interested to see what’s next.”
Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany in “Chucky.”
SYFY
This should mean Tilly is officially done playing in the world of “Chucky,” right? Think again.
“I love ‘Chucky’ so much, and I would feel so devastated if there was ever a ‘Chucky’ without me,” Tilly says. “But I don’t think there will be, because Don sees me as his good luck charm. And he loves my character. And no one ever dies in this story. When Don loves people, he loves to bring them back. So maybe he will have me play Tiffany’s sister or something. You know Tiffany has a sister that she also hates, right?”
Stranger things have happened to Tilly in this franchise than popping up as someone’s long-lost sister. Let’s not forget that Tiffany as a doll gave birth to her and Chucky’s nonbinary doll child named GG, who transported each half of their male-and-female-identifying soul into human twin babies. Now GG, knowing the full extent of their parents’ depravities, occupies the same doll body again as they travel the world and fight their darker impulses. So yes, nothing is off limits in “Chucky.”
Coming off Season 3, Tilly is grateful for what she was able to do in her final days as Tiffany in human form. Leading up to the finale, Jennifer Tilly was on death row for Tiffany’s most recent crime spree. But as she was strapped to the table for her lethal injection, her voodoo magic influence over the guards helped break her free at the last minute.
Tilly calls herself “lazy” when it comes to acting these days, hoping for the least number of lines in an episode –– just as long as she is in it, of course. But Tiffany facing her mortality asked a great deal of Tilly.
“I’m looking at the script and I’m like, ‘Oh no, I have to cry!’” she says. “When she is going down the green mile, she has to cry for a long time. And look, I can cry! I’m a good actress. But I would rather make a smart-aleck remark, toss a cigarette on the ground and grind it out with my high heel. Can’t someone else do the crying?”
The green-mile walk was just the start of it too. Waiting for Tiffany in the observation room of her execution was Nica (Fiona Dourif), the quadruple amputee that Tiffany has loved and mutilated in equal measure since the start of the series. Season 3 was split over two parts when the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes halted the Vancouver production last summer, which Tilly says gave Mancini time to reconsider this final exchange between Tiffany and Nica.
“Originally, Nica comes to the death chamber, and she basically tells Tiffany to burn in hell,” Tilly says. “You know, the boilerplate refrain from Nica. But then Don wrote this beautiful speech for her instead, where the compassion that Tiffany loves in Nica and the love that Nica can’t help but have for Tiffany comes through. He felt compelled to let Nica tell Tiffany the one thing she was needing to hear: that GG sends their love, and that Tiffany was a good mother.”
That uncharacteristically heartwarming moment is interrupted when Nica sees Tiffany getting away yet again in a bloody and physical prison break that surprised even Tilly.
“I have to say, I had on my skin-tight dress, my push-up bra, I’m putting knee pads on under my dress and I’m in my five-inch heels running on wet cement with bullets bouncing off,” Tilly says. “Then we did a stunt where the actor I was with grabs me and pulls me to the ground, and I thought, ‘This is not what I thought I would be doing in my 60s.’ It is, like, the best job in the whole world.”
Shane Mahood/SYFY
Tilly credits Mancini with never treating her like she aged out of the action. She likens it to watching the “Sex and the City” sequel series “And Just Like That,” and being shocked that the central characters, despite merely being in their 50s, were dealing with things like broken hips. She didn’t want that for Tiffany.
“Don doesn’t do that to me,” she says. “He sees Tiffany as almost the same age as she was 25 years ago when I first played her, so he’s not writing Jennifer Tilly as a grandma. He told me he doesn’t see any reason why I can’t keep doing the same things I have been doing for the past 25 years and, for that, I love him.”
In an ironic twist, Tilly says she met “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star when the series first premiered in the late 1990s and he offered to write her a role in the show. But then doing TV was considered a death knell for one’s movie career.
“I told Darren I wanted to be a movie star,” she says. “I didn’t want to be doing television because, back then, you couldn’t do both. But when I look back at it, ‘Sex and the City’ was such a seminal TV show, and I think maybe I should not have been so eager to draw a line in the sand. It would be fun to be on ‘And Just Like That’ now, though — but without a hip replacement.”
Until that offer comes in (and it should!), Tilly is already dreaming up the next few decades of her time with Chucky. She wants to be part of the franchise “until I am 90,” she says, and is already in Mancini’s ear about bringing back more of her friends too. In Season 2, a special dinner party episode reunited Tilly with her “Bound” costars Gina Gershon and Joe Pantoliano, as well as her sister Meg Tilly and her friend Sutton Stracke.
Stracke made her acting debut in the episode and, in turn, Tilly visited her friend for a few episodes in the most recent season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” where Stracke has appeared since 2020. Tilly jokes she was “miscast as the sympathetic best friend” brought in to grill Sutton about her dating life. “I was the Barbara Walters of the episode,” Tilly says with a laugh, noting it was a challenge because she prefers to be the center of attention. But as a diehard fan of “RHOBH,” she was just happy to be there.
“It was really fun when I was on the show,” she says. “I just did a couple of episodes, as a favor to Sutton for coming on ‘Chucky.’ But it was super fun, and a thrill for me. I am a superfan. I was like, ‘Oh my God, here I am meeting all these ladies I’ve been watching for 14 years.’ Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction for real.”
Tilly says Mancini wants to bring Stracke –– and her sister Meg, who Tiffany killed last season –– back for more episodes. But before any of that can happen, fans will have to wait and see where Tilly herself fits into the show, should Season 4 be picked up.
If nothing else, she will keep voicing Tiffany as a doll, a distinct affectation Tilly can easily access because, as she says, Tiffany “has those tiny plastic lungs.” It’s the little details like those that keep Tilly coming back.
“Tiffany is, and has always been, a fabulous character to play,” she says. “She is glamorous and campy, and, as it turns out this season, vulnerable and compassionate. Who would have thought?”