Bill Moseley is an American horror actor who played Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Otis B. Driftwood for Rob Zombie.
Quick Specs
| Born | William Lambert Moseley, November 11, 1951, Stamford, Connecticut; raised in Barrington Hills, Illinois |
| Education | Yale University |
| Before acting | freelance magazine writer for Omni, National Lampoon and others |
| Signature roles | Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986); Otis B. Driftwood in House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and 3 from Hell (2019) |
| Also | Johnny in Night of the Living Dead (1990), the Deadite Captain in Army of Darkness (1992), Luigi Largo in Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), Possum on HBO’s Carnivale (2003-2005) |
| Music | frontman of Cornbugs with Buckethead; the album Bill and Phil: Songs of Darkness and Despair (2017) with Pantera’s Philip Anselmo |
Who He Is
The man who became one of the Sawyer family started out as one of the movie’s most rattled fans. As Moseley tells it, he saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the year it opened, on a Sunday afternoon double bill with Enter the Dragon at Boston’s old Paramount. The crowd was still cheering Bruce Lee when the violin screech and the strobe-lit corpse began. It got its hooks in him. He went back to see it again and again, hoping familiarity would break the spell. It only drove it deeper.
He had grown up a horror kid, sneaking downstairs after bedtime to watch midnight horror movies on the family’s black-and-white Zenith, with a Marine Corps father who came alive at Halloween. That father, Spencer D. Moseley, had been a football star at Yale. Bill went to Yale too, then made his living as a science writer. He wrote for Omni, National Lampoon, the Soho Weekly News and Rolling Stone, and his beat was interviewing scientists. Among the scientists he interviewed was the two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, and Moseley says he still follows Pauling’s vitamin regimen.
The Work
His way into Chainsaw was a home-made parody. Moseley shot a short called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure and gave himself a cameo as the Hitchhiker. A screenwriter friend whose office was across the hall from Tobe Hooper walked a VHS copy over. As Moseley tells it, Hooper loved it, called in Steven Spielberg to watch, and promised to remember the Hitchhiker guy if he ever made a sequel. Two years later the screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson called and asked where to mail the script. Moseley assumed it was a prank. It wasn’t. He was told to look at the part of Chop Top.
The Movies, and What He Did on Them
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986): Chop Top is the Hitchhiker’s brother. He is a Vietnam veteran with a metal plate in his skull and a mouth that never stops. Moseley plays him as a giggling, scratching live wire, and his “dog will hunt!” later turned up as a sample in Primus’s “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver”. The radio-station hammer attack on Lou Perryman took nine or ten takes. Tom Savini pumped blood up through Perryman’s hair, and the foam prop hammer kept bending. After a clean take, Hooper asked for one more. Moseley asked what he was doing wrong. “Oh hell no, Bill,” Hooper said. “I’m just having fun watching you.” Moseley calls it the greatest compliment he has had on any set.
Night of the Living Dead (1990): in Tom Savini’s remake he is Johnny, the needling brother of the cemetery opening, the scene that starts the whole nightmare.
Army of Darkness (1992): a small role as the Deadite Captain, Evil Ash’s lieutenant, not Evil Ash himself. Bruce Campbell played both Ashes, and Moseley has had to correct that one publicly.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003) made him a horror icon a second time. As Otis B. Driftwood, named after Groucho Marx’s character in A Night at the Opera, he is the Firefly clan’s poet of cruelty. He returned for The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and 3 from Hell (2019) and played other parts for Zombie, including Zach “Z-Man” Garrett in Halloween (2007).
He also played Luigi Largo in the cult rock opera Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), and came back to the Sawyer family tree as Drayton Sawyer in Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013). He played the Governor opposite Nicolas Cage in Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021), and voiced Bones, added to the Texas Chain Saw Massacre game in 2024.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- He fronted the band Cornbugs in character as Chop Top, with the guitarist Buckethead and the drummer Pinchface, from 1999 to 2007.
- He is unapologetic about indie horror. He says he’s good with first-time directors because he doesn’t need a big trailer or a stack of assistants, and he treats the job as serving the production.
- He describes himself as the loose cannon on set, the actor who will fix a scene on the spot when the page doesn’t make sense.
Why He Matters
Few actors have defined two horror families seventeen years apart. Moseley’s Chop Top turned Hooper’s sequel into a black comedy with a pulse. His Otis gave Rob Zombie’s films their scariest voice, a killer who talks like a frustrated poet. In between and since, he has lent his face to a long list of low-budget productions. And it all began because a science writer couldn’t shake a movie and made a joke film about it.