Interview with Robert Englund

One of the big draws to Fan Expo Canada™ this past weekend was the 30th anniversary cast reunion of A Nightmare on Elm Street with Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon.

When A Nightmare on Elm Street first came out, I hadn’t even been born yet. It wasn’t until my young teens that I began to watch 80s slasher flicks featuring the likes of Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees and of course, Freddy Kruger. Of course by then, it had been more than a decade and the things that had spooked a generation didn’t have as much of an effect on me, but who doesn’t love old slasher films?

It was incredibly exciting to meet up with the talented Robert Englund at Fan Expo Canada™ to talk about film premieres, Freddy’s changes throughout the years and of course, putting on the makeup again for a charitable event that happened earlier this month.

Welcome to Fan Expo! Are you enjoying yourself here so far?

Yes! But I’m a little jetlagged. I just flew in from London to LA to Toronto. I just had a premiere of a film I’m starring in in London and it’s called The Last Showing. It stars some very talented young actors; Finn Jones from Game of Thrones (Loras Tyrell) and Emily Barrington who is playing the terrorists daughter on this season of 24. She was also in the White Queen. The premiere went well but I woke up this morning and didn’t remember what country I was in. Its that second or third day jetlag that really gets you so I’m a little dingy, but I’ll do my best. [laughs]

I’m interested to ask you about Freddy and his changes over the years. We watched him move from villain into a sort of sarcastic anti-hero. How did you feel as you grew with the character and he went through these changes?

You know, he was always cracking wise and was a real cruel clown in the original. He cuts his fingers off and cracks a joke, he sticks his tongue through the phone and says that famous line, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy!” and he put the face of Tina on to tease the others and he cracked a lot of jokes while he was doing what he was doing. He’s always had this very cruel sense of humour. What happened was that the fans embraced that so much that the writers of two, three, four and all the subsequent sequels worked that in and embraced that part of the character like the fans did.

These were really great writers, too! I don’t know if you realize it, but Peter Jackson wrote one of the scripts and Frank Darabont who co-wrote The Shawshank Redemption did one… there was so much talent and they were the ones that molded him. That [Freddy’s humor] just became part of the entire franchise that Freddy would sort of take this comedy into the culture and use it while he exploited and terrorized his victims, throwing their fear back at them.

[blockquote]”That sense of humour that he [Freddy] had – I look at it in comparison to the cruel clown Feste who was in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”[/blockquote]

Freddy was always vengeful. I’ve always felt like Freddy never went to Hell; because he was burned alive by vigilantes – two wrongs don’t make a right. I don’t think he went all the way to Hell because of that – I think he got stopped in purgatory and that’s where he operated from, going after the offspring of those who did him wrong.

You recently put the Freddy makeup earlier this month in Chicago; what was that like?

I did, I did. You know, a couple of years ago — there’s a great special effects group called KNB; they won an Oscar for the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and they’ve done effects for every Robert Rodriquez, Tarantino and Wes Craven movie and just hundreds of other films and they produce films, one which I was in called Wishmaster. The “K” in KNB is Robert Kurtzman and he has a new effects studio outside of Cleveland, not that far from Chicago.

When I was approached by this convention (Flashback Weekend) – one of the oldest in Chicago – its family run and what they do is they save old theatres and drive ins in Chicago, so this was a really good cause. And then I realized that I had just done a charity thing with Robert Kurtzman at his studio and I said ‘well he’s not very far, just across the state line, we can get him to do the Freddy makeup’. It would be very difficult to find the FX guys that had done my makeup in the films because they’re either really big deals or retired now.

Robert had done my makeup back in the 80s, and he had agreed to fuse the makeup in parts two and four into a new piece that felt truly in line with the Freddy aesthetic. It was designed specifically for me to wear. I think it was a good cause and I love old movies; I’m happy to download and watch films on my flat screen but I think there’s a time and a place to see a movie with other people, especially films like Avatar and Gravity, for example. It was good for all those reasons. But, because everything is digital nowadays, I was worried about the lighting on the makeup. I didn’t want it to be too bright. I thought there was a little bit too much red in it; if we ever had to do it again I think we would need to do a little bit more shadow on the top of the head. I did this without the hat so you could see my eyes better, but I did the event as Robert Englund in makeup. I wasn’t in the full drag of Freddy. The idea was I wore the tee shirt of the thirtieth anniversary that they were celebrating so that people could get a commemorative photo of Robert Englund in the Freddy makeup. I think it turned out great. I don’t know if I’ll do it again though because I still feel very protective of the character and we need to preserve his original look instead of bringing it into the digital age.