Tiffany Valentine is our forever chaotic Sapphic crush. Why? Well, two words: Jennifer Tilly. While the character was first introduced in Bride of Chucky in doll form voiced by Tilly, in subsequent entries, particularly in the series Chucky, we have gotten to see Tilly fully bring the character to life, in the incredibly meta format of Jennifer Tilly being possessed by the spirit of Tiffany Valentine.
It’s wild, it’s camp, and it’s oh-so-queer in every meaning of the word.
It’s a role that the actress can’t stop gushing over. “I love Tiffany so much,” Tilly tells PRIDE, adding that her journey and her… let’s call it complicated love story with Nica (Fiona Dourif) has been a joy to bring to the screen. “The fans loved Nica and Tiffany, they called them ‘Niffany’,” she laughs, but acknowledges that the love story is not exactly a fairytale one — unless, of course, you’re referring to the old Grimm’s fairytales. “It looked like they were having a lovely romance for a while until Tiffany ruined it by cutting off Nica’s arms and legs. That was, like, so rude of her. But Tiffany did it out of love because she loved Nica so much she never wanted her to leave,” she explains. “[Tiffany is] a little bit sociopathic, but she saw it as like clipping a butterfly’s wings, or taking a dog’s testicles off so it doesn’t run all over town. That’s how she thought. I was a little bit perturbed by how mad Nica was, it’s like, ‘Get over it! What’s your problem?’” Tilly jokes.
She also knows not everyone was thrilled with the trajectory of their love story. “[The fans] were kind of mad at me when Tiffany cut off Nica’s legs! The next morning I woke up and my Twitter was all like, ‘Good morning to everybody. Except Jennifer Tilly.’ I’m like, What? What did I do? Don [Mancini] wrote it and Fiona agreed to it!” she recalls. “Fiona she’s a very serious actress and a team player and she thought it would be great. And it was, and she just went for it. And now she’s really sexy with her artificial arms. She’s such a badass I think it was a great thing for her character to go through that metamorphosis.”
While we can all agree this romance is unbelievably toxic — after all, what do you expect from a serial killer, turned serial killing doll, turned serial killing possessed actress — but Tilly sees a real sweetness to it as well, and how it’s been healing for the character. “I think the thing is, Tiffany did fall in love with Nica. Originally, it was Chucky in Nica, but now she has the best of both worlds because Chucky epitomizes toxic masculinity and Tiffany wants to be acknowledged, and she wants to be loved,” she explains, adding that a part of Nica loves Tiffany as well. “Even though Nica was a prisoner, there was a little Stockholm Syndrome thing going on there, where she had compassion for Tiffany’s vulnerability. Even though she was being held captive and Tiffany was hitting her over the head with a frying pan, she still had compassion for Tiffany. Tiffany responded to that softness,” says Tilly. “It doesn’t hurt that, you know, Fiona is a fine-looking specimen of womanhood.”
On some level, there’s something relatable and even moving about their love story — you know, kidnapping and amputations aside, “I think that Tiffany fell in love with Nica as a person and it happened to be a woman which happens a lot sometimes in the real world also,” Tilly explains.
he question is, what does this season hold for Niffany — that is if Tiffany can miraculously escape death row and patch things up with her former flame? Well, Tilly says it’s even a bit more complicated than that. “There was definitely a time when she was way more in love with Nica than she was with Chucky. In fact, last season, she fucking hated Chucky... but now there’s a situation going on with a sort of a throuple, this weird triangle between Chucky, Nica, and Tiffany because she does love Nica also, but in a different way,” she reveals. “I think the fans would love to see Niffany back together again.”
She’s not wrong and we’ll find out soon enough if there’s hope for these two — or anyone now that a killer doll is in the White House plotting his next big kill, since Chucky returns for part two of season three on to Syfy and USA today.
