Danny Lloyd, the boy from The Shining who traded Hollywood for a biology classroom

Danny Lloyd

Photo: Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 13, 1972 Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actor and biology professor
Known for	The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Making 'The Shining'

For years, horror fans kept asking Stephen King the same thing: whatever happened to the kid from The Shining? The internet supplied its own answers. He was a pig farmer. He had six children. He hated the film and blamed it for wrecking his life. Danny Lloyd, who goes by Dan now, let most of it stand, because correcting it would have meant giving interviews, and he gave almost none. The boy who pedalled through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel with the camera hunting him at floor level grew up to teach biology in Kentucky, where he keeps the film out of the classroom.

The odd part is how it began. Lloyd grew up in small-town Illinois, where his father worked on the railroads. He was four when his father heard on local radio that Stanley Kubrick‘s production wanted a boy between five and seven, no acting experience needed. “He told me that I was always running around trying to get attention, so he sent off my photo,” Lloyd told The Guardian decades later. “I think he did it as a joke, really.” Five or six auditions later, Kubrick’s assistant telephoned the house in the middle of his fifth birthday. The director later said what had struck him was the boy’s ability to concentrate.

Lloyd, born on October 13, 1972, was five when the family moved to London for what they had been told would be a 17-week shoot. Kubrick’s habit of shooting take after take stretched it to almost a year. Lloyd was never told the plot; as far as he knew, he was making a drama about a family who lived in a hotel. Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s assistant, became his acting coach and a friend of the family for years, and the adults around him made sure he saw nothing he should not see. When Wendy runs screaming through the hotel with Danny in her arms, Shelley Duvall is carrying a life-size doll. “I specifically remember I was banned from the set for the entire time Scatman Crothers was being axed,” he said.

What he kept from the shoot is small and domestic: peanut butter sandwiches with Lisa and Louise Burns, the twins who played the Grady sisters; an Easter egg hunt Kubrick organised for the children; the thrill of riding a tricycle indoors. “Stanley was great. I remember him playing ball with me, playing catch,” he recalled. In the scene where Danny sits on his father’s lap, Jack Nicholson, he told Postmedia in 2019, “was just acting tired the whole time. I was just along for the ride.” A crew member promised to send him the tricycle when filming ended. “I was waiting and waiting for it, but it never came.”

That protection is the hidden engine of the performance. The Shining opened in 1980 and became the film people reach for when they want to describe a child in danger, and the child at its centre had no idea he was in one. He was 10 or 11 before he saw the full film. “For me when I watch The Shining, it’s like watching a home movie,” he said. “I understand how it scares people.” The stillness that reads on screen as a boy carrying a terrible secret was, on set, a five-year-old doing what a patient adult asked of him, one take at a time.

There was one more role. In the television film Will: G. Gordon Liddy, broadcast in 1982, he played the future Watergate conspirator as a boy. After that came auditions and very little else. Every casting meant a long trip from Illinois. “I had to take off school and my parents had to take off work,” he said. “In the end, it wasn’t very fruitful.” He stopped at 13 or 14, and his parents did not argue. “They were never stage parents.” Kubrick did not forget him: for years the Lloyds received Christmas cards from the director, who telephoned around his high school graduation to ask how school was going.

The legend around Lloyd says more about the people who built it than about him. The myth of the haunted child star needs a casualty, and his silence was easy to read as a wound. The facts are plainer. He worked on a farm and at a Wal-Mart to pay for college, he has four children, and he calls the film “a good experience. I look back on it fondly.” He also complicates the image of Kubrick as a tormentor of actors. Duvall and Nicholson both described it as one of the hardest shoots of their careers, and nothing in his memory erases that, but for the youngest member of the cast the same director was a large bearded man who played catch.

The classroom is where the film became a nuisance. When students found out, some waggled their fingers and whispered “redrum”. “It was disruptive in class, so that’s when I began to really play it down,” he said. “As a teacher, you’re supposed to be in control.” By 2019 he had taught biology for more than a decade at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College, to pre-med, pre-pharmacy and nursing students.

The way back on screen came through King’s sequel. When the novel Doctor Sleep came out in 2013, Lloyd told the New York Daily News that he “would be up for a cameo for sure.” Mike Flanagan, adapting the book, found him on Twitter and sent him a direct message. In Doctor Sleep, released in 2019 with Ewan McGregor as the adult Danny Torrance, Lloyd appears as a spectator at the Little League game where the True Knot closes in on the boy played by Jacob Tremblay. “He came back for a day, and we were thrilled to have him,” producer Trevor Macy told Variety. He also turns up as himself in Filmworker, the documentary about Vitali.

These days the public part of his life happens at horror conventions, a few a year, where he admits the fans often know more than he does. “I’m not much for the trivia,” he said. In July 2024, days after Duvall’s death, The Kingcast, a Stephen King podcast, released an episode with Lloyd as guest and Flanagan as co-host, going back over Kubrick, Nicholson, Duvall and Vitali.

No new screen work has been announced, and nothing suggests he is looking for any. The Shining keeps returning to cinemas in 35mm prints, and every new audience asks the old question about the boy on the tricycle. Lloyd’s answer has not changed since he gave it to The Guardian: “I still have to grade the tests at school, get the kids to bed. All the regular stuff.”

Tags: actors, Stanley Kubrick, Mike Flanagan, Jack Nicholson, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Danny Lloyd

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