What Happened to Ed Gale? Chucky Actor Passes Away
Here's what we know so far about Ed Gale's death.
Ed Gale, the actor behind iconic roles like Chucky in Child's Play and the title character in Howard the Duck, has died at age 61.
His niece, Kayse Gale, confirmed the news on Facebook, stating that Gale passed away on May 27, 2025, in Los Angeles. They have not disclosed the cause of death.
Gale began his career in Hollywood with Howard the Duck (1986), performing in the full-body suit while Chip Zien provided the voice. 'Yes, I was in the suit every day for nearly 10 months. I was the only actor who played the role of Howard The Duck,' Gale said in a 2018 interview with Rediscover The 80s.
He gained further recognition for portraying the evil doll Chucky in the 1988 film Child's Play and its sequels Child's Play 2 and Bride of Chucky. Gale continued to appear in cult classics such as Spaceballs, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, and Mom and Dad Save the World. His television appearances included Baywatch, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Land of the Lost, and My Name Is Earl.
Born on August 23, 1963, in Plainwell, Michigan, Gale moved to California at age 20 with only $41. He went on to appear in more than 130 films, TV shows, and commercials. His film credits also include The Little Rascals, Unstrung Heroes, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, and Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
'He delighted in the slow build up of telling a good story, and cheating at cribbage. He had one hell of a laugh, and he will be missed. Rest in love you cranky bastard,' Kayse Gale wrote. Gale was also a frequent guest at fan conventions across the country.
The post What Happened to Ed Gale? Chucky Actor Passes Away appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
01-07-2025
- Boston Globe
‘Back to the Future' celebrates 40 years, and a musical reworking
Luke Antony Neville, left, and Lucas Hallauer, right, in "Back to the Future." McLeod9 Creative Advertisement However, as they met with potential producers, they faced skepticism. 'We thought, 'This is going to be easy! Everybody and their uncle ought to be lining up to do this,'' Gale says. 'But it wasn't like that. They'd always say, 'Well, you guys have never done musical theater before. What makes you think you can do it?' And we'd say, 'Well, we invented the franchise! We know a whole lot about these characters and the story.'' Advertisement After a long-and-winding development path, 'Back to the Future: The Musical' finally bowed in Manchester, England, in 2020 before opening in London the following year, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Broadway beckoned in 2023, and now its national tour speeds into the Citizens Opera House, July 8-20, presented by Broadway in Boston, on the heels of the film's 40th anniversary on July 3. But as with the paradox that Marty unleashes by time-traveling back to 1955 and nearly screwing up his parents' courtship, the musical headed to Boston would've been erased from existence if not for a few 'sliding doors' moments. It all started with a storm that flooded screenwriter Bob Gale's childhood home in St. Louis. While helping his parents clean out the basement, he found his father's high school yearbook and saw his picture as senior class president. 'I thought about the president of my class, who was one of these rah-rah school spirit guys who I would've had nothing to do with,' Gale recalls. 'And I wondered, 'Was my dad that kind of guy? Would I have been friends with my dad if I'd gone to high school with him?'' As he stared at the photo, a lightning-bolt thought struck him: What if I could go back and meet my father back then? That sparked the idea for a film about a teenager who gets accidentally whisked back in time, encounters his parents as high schoolers, and tries to ensure they fall in love with each other so he doesn't get deleted from history. As Gale and Zemeckis began developing the musical, they enlisted the film's composer Alan Silvestri and Grammy-winning songwriter Glen Ballard to write the score, with influences from both 1980s and 1950s rock. But the road was strewn with potholes. By 2014, they'd parted ways with visionary theater auteur Jamie Lloyd, who just won a Tony Award for his reimagining of 'Sunset Boulevard' ('He had some wacky ideas,' Gale says), and hired Tony-winning ' Advertisement It was important to them to strike a balance between honoring the original film while creating something new for a different genre. 'One of the things that we were very resolute about was that we did not want this stage production to be a carbon copy of the movie,' Gale says. Many of the movie's famous lines and classic moments remain, but other aspects were altered or excised. So you'll see the DeLorean fly and Doc declare, 'Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.' Lorraine ( With a musical, though, you can crack open the characters' hearts and inner-lives in song. Silvestri and Ballard wrote a heartfelt second act number for Doc Brown (David Josefsberg), 'For the Dreamers,' where he sings about creative visionaries, both the famous and the failed, who have big ideas and 'never stop believing in them.' 'Musical theater gave us a way to really go deep into Doc Brown's head,' Gale says. 'And because Doc Brown sings, he automatically becomes a warmer character.' Advertisement They wrote a 1950s-style doo-wop number, 'Pretty Baby,' for Marty's mother Lorraine to sing in the 1955 timeline to the handsome young stranger asleep in her bed, as Marty nervously fends off her advances. 'Musical theater can take the reality of a situation and put it into a heightened, kind of twisted place,' Rando said. For Marty's meek father, George (Mike Bindeman), who's bossed around by his high school bully, Biff (Nathaniel Hackmann), where 'we learn about him and how he wants the girl, but he's afraid to go after her,' Gale says. Then in 'Put Your Mind To It,' Marty tries to boost George's self-confidence so he can win Lorraine's heart by 'teaching him to dance and to stand up for himself and fight for what he wants.' Ultimately, the father-son dynamic is key. 'The boy learns about his parents in a way that he had never dreamed of and finds himself closer to his family at the end,' Rando says. Naturally, the car is the 1.21 gigawatt star. So the team needed to create the illusion that the flux-capacitor-powered DeLorean speeds across the stage at 88 miles per hour, travels through time and later achieves liftoff. That meant leaning into the innovative magic of Tim Hatley's scenic design, Finn Ross' video design, and Chris Fisher's theatrical illusions. 'It's really spectacular,' Gale says. 'I think we raised the bar on what you could do on stage.' Of course, they worried about disappointing fans with a stage version that didn't live up to the film. But Gale says that most fans he's encountered have adored the show, including one woman in London who told him she quit therapy and instead spent that money on tickets to see 'Back to the Future' every week—and she's happier for it. Advertisement Gale speculates that the story continues to resonate 40 years later because it captures the moment in every child's life when 'they suddenly understand that my parents were once young like me. That's a cosmic idea.' It also powerfully illustrates how one decision in life can have far-reaching effects. 'We see these two different timelines for the McFly family—one where George stands up for himself, and one is where George wimps out. So it's a good reminder to people to say, 'The things that I do in my life matter. This may be an important decision I'm making, and I need to give it thought.' BACK TO THE FUTURE Presented by Broadway in Boston. At: Citizens Opera House, July 8-20. Tickets: from $40;
Engadget
25-06-2025
- Engadget
M3GAN 2.0 review: The AI camp queen pulls a Terminator 2
M3GAN was an unexpected hit, and for good reason: It was the best killer toy horror film since Child's Play , combining comedy and camp with a meme-worthy android lead. For the sequel, writer/director Gerard Johnstone (working off a story from him and the first film's writer Akela Cooper), have taken a few notes from Terminator 2. This time around, there's an even more evil android on the scene (Amelia, played by Ivanna Sakhno) who wants AI to rule the world. And there's only one somewhat less evil android that can stop her: M3GAN. If that setup sounds silly and campy to you, well... it is. That's the point. More so than the first film, M3GAN 2.0 leans into the sheer silliness of its premise and is all the more fun for it. It's also not really a horror movie this time, it's a full-on action film with tons of gunplay, hand-to-hand combat and one wingsuit infiltration sequence that would be right at home in a Mission: Impossible film. Universal Pictures Speaking of Mission: Impossible , it's hard not to notice that M3GAN 2.0 features practically the same AI takeover plotline that bogged down The Final Reckoning . The difference here is that it's actually somewhat well-informed — M3GAN 2.0 isn't just about "evil AI," it also explores (however briefly) the notion of AI autonomy, technology regulation and ethics. (For God sakes, there's a killer Section 230 joke that only tech-savvy readers would understand.) M3GAN 2.0 once again centers on Gemma (Allison Williams), the engineer who originally created M3GAN, and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Following the events of the first film, Gemma was briefly sent to jail but reemerges as a technology critic. (Isn't it funny how many "tech critics" pop up after making bank from Big Tech?) She then teams up with a tech ethicist (Aristotle Athari) to push governments for stronger technology regulation, especially when it comes to AI. The existence of Amelia seems to prove her point. In the opening of M3GAN 2.0 , we watch as she goes on a covert mission to rescue a military scientist, only to disobey her programming and kill him instead. It turns out Amelia was built on the bones of M3GAN's design, and for some reason she's aiming to kill everyone involved with her creation. That mission inevitably leads back to Gemma and Cady, of course. Universal Pictures It's not a spoiler to say that M3GAN didn't really die at the end of the first movie. Turns out, she backed herself up to the cloud and has been watching Gemma and Cady via their smart home devices. After a set piece involving inept FBI agents, M3GAN convinces Gemma that she needs some sort of physical body to stop Amelia. Funnily enough, her first new outfit is the not at all fictional Moxie child companion robot I tested a few years ago. (Embodied, the startup behind Moxie, folded last year, leaving its handful of customers with a dead robot. That may be why Moxie M3GAN is allowed to swear.) M3GAN gets her wish and, like the Six Million Dollar Man , receives a fully upgraded body, one that's better, faster and stronger. (And also one that's more befitting of Amie Donald, the talented young actress who plays her.) And at that point, the movie turns into a full-on action fest as M3GAN infiltrates a tech lab to save Cady. Thankfully, MEGAN 2.0 understands the assignment: Fight scenes are energetic and well-choreographed, and Johnstone makes sure that everything is easily legible. The multitude of Steven Seagal references also makes it clear he's a fan of schlocky action cinema. Universal Pictures Johnstone is also clearly a tech nerd: the film is filled with references to places like Xerox PARC, one of the early R&D labs that developed concepts like the GUI (graphical user interface) and mouse. There's an Elon Musk analog, played by the great Jemaine Clement, who has an over-inflated ego and an obsession with brain interface devices. And the film pokes fun at anti-tech crusaders, who sometimes push back against any sort of technological advancement as inherently evil. M3GAN 2.0 balances a smart view of tech alongside sheer summer movie fun. And while it runs close to two hours, it never feels like a slog like the nearly three-hour long The Final Reckoning . Both movies are about the impending doom of an AI apocalypse, but M3GAN 2.0 manages to do it without being too self-serious and far more well-informed. Now that it seems like we're just a few clicks away from some sort of tech apocalypse, poking fun at it just seems like a better way to cope.
New York Post
19-06-2025
- New York Post
Ex-employee says Truist Bank's Chucky doll prank gave her PTSD, ruined her career: lawsuit
No child's play. A former Truist Bank worker said a prank at her ex-employer involving a life-sized Chuck doll has left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and turned her life into a real-world horror movie. Debra Jones is suing the company for discrimination after her boss allegedly placed the creepy red-headed doll – which comes to life and kills people in the movie 'Child's Play' – in her office chair at a North Carolina branch last year. 3 The killer 'Chucky' doll from Child's Play 3. ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection The doll was meant to be a harmless prank during her training, but for Jones, it was no laughing matter, the lawsuit filed in Nash County contends. The employee had a crippling fear of dolls, plus major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and the autoimmune disorder vitiligo, according to the suit she filed in May. In fact, she said her boss had known about her phobia and other conditions, which inspired the prank in the first place. Her brush with 'the doll that kills people,' as it is referred to in the lawsuit, ruined her career, she said. Jones developed PTSD and took eight weeks of medical leave, according to the suit. Even when she came back, she left work early three times a week for treatments for her autoimmune disorder, which she said had been triggered by her run-in with Chucky. She said her condition — which affects the pigmentation of the skin — made her the butt of jokes around the office, and leaving work early landed her on her managers' bad side. 3 Debra Jones was fired by Truist Bank and is now suing for discrimination. Bloomberg via Getty Images 3 Alex Vincent holding Chucky the doll in Child's Play 2. ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection The company finally gave her the ax in March, claiming she 'cannot keep using her anxiety and emotional problems as an excuse' for bad performance, the lawsuit states. Jones is suing Trust Bank for emotional distress and discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The lawsuit does not name a dollar amount sought for the damages.
