Before Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining (1980), he already had works such as Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) under his belt, which are part of the history of cinema.
Attracted by the novel of Stephen King (78), the British director placed ads in newspapers in the state of Illinois because he was looking for children between 5 and 7 years old to star in a movie. The news was also spread on local radio, and that's how it reached the Lloyd family's home.
Stanley, the head of the family, was a humble railway worker who decided to send a photo of his son Danny because he thought it would be funny if his little one could appear in a film. While the latter was celebrating his fifth birthday, the producers called their home to inform them that he had been chosen.
In one of the few interviews that Danny Lloyd (53) has given since leaving the cinema, he told The Guardian in 2017 that his father made that decision because "according to him, I was always trying to get attention, so he sent the photo. I think he did it as a joke, actually."
At no point was he told it was a horror movie. The director protected him from suffering psychological harm, so everyone on the team told him that it was the story of a family living in a hotel.
During filming, he became very close friends with Jack Nicholson (89), Shelley Duvall -who passed away at the age of 75 in 2024- and with the twins Lisa (56) and Louise Burns (56) who, slightly older than Danny, used to meet to eat peanut butter sandwiches.
The success was overwhelming. Over time, The Shining became a cult movie and Danny a star. His scenes pedaling the tricycle along the hallway are iconic.
Unfortunately, like many child prodigies, the auditions he did afterwards were not successful. He only appeared in one more movie, Will: G. Gordon Liddy (1982), and at the age of 14, he left it all behind.
When asked if the rejections bothered him, the former actor was clear in his conversation with The Guardian: "No, I wouldn't say it was upsetting. I always enjoyed it. It was exciting. But as I grew up, it became a bit boring." When he told his parents that he wanted to continue studying, they agreed. "They were fine with it (...) They made sure I had a normal education."
While studying at the university, he worked at the Wal-Mart department store in his hometown and also drove a tractor on a pig farm to pay for his studies.
After graduating in biology, he pursued postgraduate studies in the same field at Eastern Illinois University in 1998. Since 2004, he has been working as a biology, anatomy, and physiology teacher at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College (ECTC) on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky. "Probably a life in Hollywood wouldn't have been for me anyway. I'm proud to come from the Midwest, and that's where I feel comfortable," he said in another interview. His students are unaware that he was the boy from The Shining.
He is married to Jessi Diana Brackett, with whom he has four children, and together they lead a completely normal life away from the media spotlight. When their two older children discovered during their adolescence that their father had participated in Kubrick's film, they began to affectionately tease him. Little else is known about his private life.
Between 2017 and 2019, he made an exception and came out of retirement to agree to collaborate on the documentaryFilmworker (2017) about the figure of Leon Vitali, an English actor and right-hand man of the master Kubrick. Two years later, he made a cameo in Doctor Sleep, the sequel to the 1980 classic.