Chucky introduces non-binary Sabrina actor as killer doll’s children Glen/Glenda
Non-binary actor Lachlan Watson plays Glen/Glenda, the twin children of murderous doll Chucky and bride Tiffany, in the Syfy and USA Network Chucky TV show. (Getty/Disney)
Chucky creator Don Mancini said the horror show ‘honours the trans experience’ by featuring the murderous doll’s twins Glen/Glenda, played by non-binary actor Lachlan Watson.
Watson, who is best known for their role as Theo in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, will play twins Glen and Glenda – the twin children of Chucky and Tiffany. The beloved characters were first introduced to horror fans in the 1998’s Bride of Chucky, but they didn’t formally step into the spotlight until 2004’s Seed of Chucky.
The twins were mentioned in the first season of Don Mancini’s TV adaptation when Chucky (voiced by Brad Dourif) explained to Jake (Zackary Arthur) that he had a “genderfluid kid” and that he supported the LGBTQ+ community because he’s “not a monster”.
Mancini told io9 that he hoped LGBTQ+ Chucky fans will love Lachlan’s acting prowess and how the show “honours the trans experience” by including Glen/Glenda.
“I hope that our queer audience, our trans audience, will really love these characters and the performances that Lachlan gave as these characters,” Mancini said. “I hope they love it as much as I do, because it was really important to us that we honour the trans experience with these characters.”
In a separate interview with ComicBook.com, Mancini said it was a “necessity” to bring back Glen and Glenda as characters in the show as they hadn’t appeared in the Chucky franchise for quite some time.
Mancini explained Seed of Chucky “didn’t do well” when it first came out so he was “forbidden” from mentioning Glen/Glenda “for a while in the franchise” by the people he was “working with at the time”. This was despite his want to “allude to those characters” in both Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky.
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“I think their thinking was, ‘Okay, people didn’t like Seed of Chucky, so we want to stay away from anything that reminds them of that’,” Mancini said. “I mean, that’s not the way I felt. I think that was their reasoning.”
He said the team he’s working with now “were completely open” to bringing back the characters once the franchise “crossed over into television”.
Mancini added it helped that current executives are “huge horror fans and fans of the Chucky franchise” as well as the world being “more welcoming” to LGBTQ+ identities.
“And of course, fortunately, the world has evolved to a point that it is more welcoming to this kind of material,” he said. “So I knew that on top of that, having eight hours of story at our disposal to tell was the perfect opportunity to start going down these different avenues and exploring these characters from the franchise’s past that people have been wondering about over the years.”
Chucky season two premiered on 5 October on USA Network and Syfy, and new episodes drop every Wednesday.
