You really can’t tell the life story of actor R.A. Mihailoff without bringing up Jeff Burr.
Not only did the late director give him the break of a lifetime with the title role in 1990’s Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Mihailoff also counts him among his nearest and dearest friends — in and out of the film business.
“I met him when he was a student at the University of Southern California film school,” Mihailoff recounted at a convention stop in the northwest exurbs of Atlanta on Oct. 11. “Him putting me in Texas Chainsaw Massacre III changed my life — probably 85 percent of the success I’ve had is directly because of him putting me in that movie.”
Burr died in 2023 at the age of 60. Most people called him Jeff, but Mihailoff used a different name — Buddy Burr.
“Whenever I’d go to Dalton, Georgia, which I did every year, practically … Jeff and two of his friends, the four of us boys would go to a sushi restaurant called Seasons,” Mihailoff recollected. “Buddy would not eat sushi and he wouldn’t sit in the damn booth — he had to have a chair at the end of the table and he always got a plate of teriyaki chicken.”
Since Burr’s death, Mihailoff said the tradition carries on.
“The three survivors, we go to Seasons, we get his plate of teriyaki and put his chair at the end of the table,” he said.
Mihailoff, now approaching his seventies, reflected on his favorite moment on the set of the Leatherface.
“When they were in the body pit, a lot of my friends worked that night,” he recounted. “I wasn’t even working that night but I rode up just to hang out with everybody … there I am in Hollywood making a movie with my friends, you can’t beat that.”
For years Texas Chainsaw Massacre fans have speculated on the possibility — or even the mere existence — of an alternate cut of Leatherface. Mihailoff noted that there was at least one particularly vicious kill in the working script of the movie that was excised.
“According to Wikipedia, it’s the last movie to get an X rating,” Mihailoff said. “I remember one scene that was in the script, if you recall the movie Toni Hudson — the little blonde girl, the first escapee — when I impale her on the broken branch and I just drill into her with the chainsaw? It was supposed to be, it was written, that I split her from crotch to crown … I don’t know if they thought that was too gruesome or too expensive, but they didn’t do that.”
Mihailoff shared his thoughts on the subsequent Leatherfaces who have graced the silver (and streaming) screens.
“I’ve watched all the guys before me and I’ve pretty much watched all the guys after me,” Mihailoff said. “The Netflix one, I haven’t seen it yet.”
In a particularly meta moment, the star of Leatherface (1990) waxed philosophical on 2017’s Leatherface. That’s the one co-directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo — a.k.a., that time they filmed a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie in, of all places, Bulgaria.
“They killed the kid who should’ve been Leatherface!” he lamented. “The three escapees from the mental asylum were two pretty boys and a big, long-haired kid who was non-verbal — I wonder who was supposed to be Leatherface?”
That plot element aside, Mahailoff still considers Leatherface ‘17 to be a pretty decent flick.
“I just don’t think it should’ve been in the canon,” he added.
Although Mihailoff will always be known as Leatherface, he’s starred in plenty of other films and television series. Among other roles, he’s appeared on Full House, Highway to Heaven and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose — not to mention tons of genre films, with titles like Death House, Slasher.com and Dark House.
“I don’t have any kids, at least none that I claim,” he said. “Parents say they love all of their children for different reasons and I love all of the movies that I did for different reasons.”
He said he especially enjoyed shooting Hatchet II, where he got to hobnob with horror icons like Kane Hodder, Tony Todd and Danielle Harris.
“We had a blast doing that movie,” he said. “We shot in a studio in Los Angeles then we did some location work in Louisiana.”
Then there’s 2017’s Smothered, which was directed by John Schneider — yes, Bo Duke himself from The Dukes of Hazzard.
It was an intriguing role, Mihailoff said, since he was technically playing “himself” in the film — albeit, with quite a few liberties taken for comedic effect.
“The gag, whatever, is a bunch of washed up horror movie stars — and they’re not making any money at a con — so they get a better offer to come and terrorize the residents of an RV park,” he summed up the plot. “Each of us gets knocked off … onscreen, I was the first one to die. Behind the scenes, in reality, they filmed my death scene on the last day of filming.”
Outside of his film work Mihailoff also briefly dabbled in the world of professional wrestling. He even trained at a wrestling school with some of the biggest names in the industry — long before they became pop cultural icons.
“My good friend Brett Wagner actually gave John Cena his first gimmick, the Prototype,” Mihailoff recounted. “John Cena was several rotations ahead of me and I never saw him there.”
Mihailoff also shared an experience he had brushing elbows with the late Hulk Hogan.
“We were at a motorcycle rally and I walked up to him, he was surrounded by kids, and I said ‘Hulk, I just want to tell you something, I think you’re the best thing that ever happened to professional wrestling,’” he said. “As I was walking away, he goes ‘Hey brother, I need you on my tag team.’ I guess he lost my phone number or something, because he never called me.”
So what’s R.A. up to these days? Well, for starters, he recently produced a film called Pig Hill, which had its world premiere in London back in September. The North American premiere followed a month later at the Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio.
“It’s based on a local legend in Meadville, Pennsylvania,” Mihailoff noted. “Allegedly, there are caverns in the hill where hideous mutant pig people lurk.”
The film stars Rainey Qualley as an intrepid reporter investigating the myth — which, in the movie, turns out to be not so mythical after all.
“We just signed a deal with Cineverse, the same company that distributes Terrifier and the new Toxic Avenger,” Mihailoff said. “They want to get it out by the end of the year.”