Actor Brad Dourif Crazy About His Job

Brad Dourif has played so many crazies he’s sometimes tempted to doubt his own sanity.

Dourif’s tenure as a nut case dates to the beginning of his movie career 15 years ago in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” where he played the role of Billy Bibbit.

Since winning an Oscar nomination for that portrayal, the slender, red-haired actor has appeared in 20 movies, playing a succession of maniacs, weirdos and mental cases.

Still, Dourif is not dour about his plight. Like most actors, he is convinced that lunatics are more fun to play than what passes for normal types.

Most recently, Dourif was seen as the Gemini Killer, possessed by the devil in a priest’s body, in “The Exorcist III.”

How deranged can you get?

“That’s about as far as you can go,” a grinning Dourif acknowledged during a recent lunch. “But I can’t say I think any of this is type-casting. That would drive me crazy.”

Dourif’s other roles included a murderous racist cop in “Mississippi Burning” and the homicidal doll in “Child’s Play.”

Making a career of wackos has its rewards. In “The Exorcist III,” Dourif spoke one of the longest, uninterrupted monologues in recent memory.

Locked in a prison cell with George C. Scott for the scene, Dourif reeled off 20 pages of script during the single speech.

“I memorized it in about three weeks,” he recalled. “I’d read it through over and over for two hours every day.

Dourif took time out from his film career to teach acting at New York’s Columbia University for a couple of years. But the lure of greasepaint and Hollywood greenbacks brought him back to movies.

“Right now I’m pretty popular with young people,” he said, laughing. “They love horror films and, believe me, I play some pretty horrible characters.”