Danny Lloyd traded child acting for a college classroom, and a faculty catalog dated July 1, 2026, lists him as an associate professor at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College in Kentucky. He’s 54 now, with a master’s degree from Eastern Illinois University earned in 1998.
He was about 5 when he played Danny Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Released in the U.S. on May 23, 1980, the film earned $47,194,352 domestically against a $19 million budget.
Lloyd didn’t know he was making a horror film. Kubrick hadn’t told him the plot, and Lloyd thought the story was about a family living in a hotel. Scatman Crothers played Dick Hallorann, whose ax attack was filmed entirely without Lloyd on set.
A life-sized dummy stood in for Lloyd in some frightening scenes, including one where Wendy runs screaming with Danny in her arms. Kubrick and the crew kept the children’s time on set light with games of catch, an Easter egg hunt and indoor tricycle rides. Lloyd also shared peanut-butter sandwiches with Lisa and Louise Burns, who played the twins.
A crew member promised him the tricycle he rode in the movie. Lloyd said it never arrived.
About a year after the film’s release, Lloyd first saw an approximately 10-minute cut with the frightening material removed. He saw the full film around age 10 or 11. “For me when I watch The Shining, it’s like watching a home movie. I understand how it scares people… But I look back on it with so many memories,” Lloyd said in 2017.
“The Shining was a good experience. I look back on it fondly,” he said in October 2017. His next role was young G. Gordon Liddy in the 1982 TV movie Will. More auditions followed, but the work didn’t.
By 13 or 14, he wanted to stop. “As I got a little bit older, it got kind of boring,” Lloyd said in that 2017 interview.
His parents supported his decision. He later worked on a Midwest farm to help pay for university.
Teaching became his career. After working at Olney Central College, he was in his 8th year teaching biology in Elizabethtown by October 2015.
At the time, he had 4 children and a small farm in rural Kentucky. He skipped a London Shining reunion that month, sending a video of his son Ben riding a Big Wheel instead.
“I still have to grade the tests at school, get the kids to bed,” he said in October 2017.
He briefly returned to acting in 2019, spending a day on Doctor Sleep as a baseball spectator after director Mike Flanagan contacted him. In June that year, Lloyd said his children had watched The Shining on Netflix: “When it was on Netflix, my kids were watching it and making fun of my haircut.”
