Some hardcore Tommy Doyle fans want Anthony Michael Hall dumped from Halloween Kills
A few months ago, we reported that Anthony Michael Hall had joined the cast of Halloween Kills, the sequel to David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot, as an adult version of Tommy Doyle. In the original movie, Tommy was the kid that Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was babysitting when Michael Myers attacked, and the original kid version of him was played by Brian Andrews. It’s certainly not unusual for Hollywood to recast kid characters when they show up in subsequent sequels or reboots as adults (a young Paul Rudd even played Tommy Doyle in the crummy The Curse Of Michael Myers), and yet, shortly after casting Hall, Halloween Kills also brought in original Halloween actress Kyle Richards to reprise her role as Tommy’s friend Lindsey Wallace.
Brian Andrews only has just over a dozen roles since Halloween, and he doesn’t have the name recognition of an Anthony Michael Hall or Real Housewives cast member Kyle Richards, but a group of dedicated Tommy Doyle fans have now set up an online petition asking the producers of Halloween Kills to dump Hall and replace him with the “iconic Brian Andrews” (who, as the petition helpfully notes, performed “unforgettable lines like ‘But you can’t kill the Boogeyman,’ ‘The Boogeyman’s outside,’ and “Was that the Boogeyman?’”). The petition, which has 558 signatures as of this writing, says that Hall has been hired to play Tommy “for some inexplicable reason” and that the casting is “outrageous, audacious, and wildly offensive,” but the fact that we don’t know why Hall was hired to play Tommy doesn’t mean there’s no reason for it.
It could be as simple as Brian Andrews not being a big enough star these days and “the original Tommy Doyle is back!” not being a particularly big deal to the producers, or it could mean that they have something more in mind for the character. We theorized back when Hall was originally cast that Green might be planning some kind of twist, like maybe Tommy becomes a new serial killer after Michael was supposedly killed in the last movie. Or maybe it’s a small role and the producers simply didn’t care that much about who played Tommy Doyle? Sorry to shatter the illusion, but Hollywood can be pretty shitty and people don’t always get the sort of treatment that we may think they deserve.