TV Talk: Pinhead actor from ‘Hellraiser’ lives in Pittsburgh, guest stars on ‘Gotham Knights’

Doug Bradley, the British actor who made Pinhead a horror icon in the “Hellraiser” films that began in 1987, now resides in Pittsburgh. And this month, Bradley gets introduced as Joe Chill on The CW’s “Gotham Knights.” Chill is in prison for the murders of Bruce Wayne’s parents.

Bradley, 68, moved to the Monroeville area in 2013 after meeting his wife, Steph Sciullo. But he had visited prior to that, including appearances at local sci-fi/horror conventions.

A native of Liverpool, England, Bradley finds parallels between his hometown and Pittsburgh.

“My first response was, ‘It’s a river city,’ ” Bradley said, noting Liverpool is a coastal river city and London, where he also once lived, is dominated by its River Thames. “And now I’ve come to a city that’s got three of the damn things!

“Pittsburgh reminds me of Liverpool in a lot of ways,” he continued. “That industrial past that was lost equates in quite a lot of ways to the history of Liverpool. Both cities are finding a new identity for themselves. In both cities, the arts and music play a prominent part, and there’s a good, salty, hard-bitten attitude and edge about Pittsburgh, which also reminds me of Liverpool.”

On “Gotham Knights,” which follows the adopted son (Oscar Morgan) of the late Bruce Wayne, Bradley’s Joe Chill has been part of the Batman story, but viewers finally get to meet him in the April 25 episode (9 p.m., WPCW-TV).

Filmed in early November 2022 in Atlanta, the role came Bradley’s way as he was getting ready to leave the U.K., where he had attended his daughter’s wedding.

“I didn’t know anything about ‘Gotham Knights’ other than it was the newest ‘Batman’ spin-off, so I thought, ‘I’ll just give my scenes a quick skim read,’ and then I was very quickly sitting on the bed reading all my scenes carefully,” Bradley recalled. “I was immediately hooked by both the story and the quality of the writing, so straight-away I thought, ‘Wow, I really want to do this.’ ”

The character of Joe Chill was new to Bradley (“I’m a Batman fan, I’m not a Batman nerd,” he said good- naturedly), so he Googled the character and started to learn about Chill’s role in the Batman saga.

“He tells us in the (‘Gotham Knights’) script that on the night of the murder of Bruce’s parents, he claims he’s a hired gun and all he was told to do was to mug a rich couple (not kill them),” Bradley said. “On that basis, you might have him down as a standard hoodlum with everything that might imply. But in the way he talks and the way he thinks and his attitude, what jumped out at me in the writing is he didn’t seem to be this kind of person at all. He talked in multisyllabic words, and he struck me as a very thoughtful person. The next thing I had to try to wrap my head around was what 50 years in a prison cell does to you.”

Bradley’s signature role will always be the lead cenobite, aka Pinhead, the pale-faced “Hellraiser” character with pins protruding from all over his head and face. Although Bradley had no idea how popular the initially unnamed character would become, he did not see “Hellraiser” as just another job because of his friendship with the film’s writer/director, Clive Barker.

“That relationship goes back to Liverpool, probably around 1968, 1969, when we were both in the same high school, John Lennon’s alma mater, and I was cast in a school play and told to report to rehearsals, where I met Clive and my fellow cast members,” Bradley said. “That day changed my life.”

Bradley and Barker spent a decade working in British independent theater on plays Barker wrote.

“We thought we were geniuses, and the world kept resolutely ignoring us by and large,” Bradley said.

After the theater group broke up in 1983, Bradley didn’t hesitate a few years later when Barker asked him to play the “Hellraiser” role.

“I knew we were doing something different and something good, but I thought we’d make a bit of a splash and then the world would forget about us,” Bradley said. “Apparently, that was not the case.”

Bradley said — and the “Gotham Knight” role demonstrates — that moving to Pittsburgh hasn’t diminished his acting options. He has stayed busy, including filming roles in some local independent movies (“The Barn 2,” “The Trip”). And he does a lot of voiceover acting work, including recording spoken-word contributions on albums by English extreme metal band Cradle of Filth at PMI Digital in Downtown Pittsburgh.

He also has done voiceover, recorded locally, for the second season of Amazon Prime Video’s adult animated comedy “Invincible.”

“I’m actually playing three characters who look the same and sound the same,” Bradley said.

So, maybe a riff on Pinhead?

“It’s never far from my door, let’s put it that way.”