Horror icon and legendary character actor Robert Englund recently sat down for a 45-minute Q & A with fans at this year’s Colorado Springs Comic Con. The Freddy Krueger actor was quite lively and very animated, touching on a variety of topics related to his career and acting in general. Below are highlights from the conversation relating to his time playing the iconic Freddy Krueger in the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ series:
On getting into character and Freddy’s mindset:
“My inspiration was about a week into it. I’ve been up since 4 in the morning, makeup applied. And it’s around 11, 11:30 (am) and I’m getting touched up. I’m sitting there in a sweater, and it’s like 86 degrees out, and I’ve got the sweater on and these oily pants and a pair of boots on and wool socks and that damn hat and I’m all sealed up and my brain is bubbling up underneath all those prosthetics. And into the makeup room waltzed Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp. And arguably they’re the two most beautiful people in the world at this moment in time. And they’re sitting there and I’m getting poked by that crusty (makeup) brush…and the makeup girl gives them little tiny pink battery operated fans because (said mockingly) ‘It’s so hot and they’re so pretty and she wants to keep them cool’. They don’t even need makeup, I don’t know what they’re doing in the makeup room, they’re so gorgeous. And I realized this envy, this anger that I’m feeling, this jealousy of these young, beautiful kids with their whole career ahead of them and I’m turning thirty and I’m in this movie and maybe I made the wrong decision, I don’t need this little horror movie, I’m starring on television right now, I’m making more money than I’ve ever made. I wanted to work with Wes (Craven), but I don’t know, I’m miserable and I’m hot. And then I thought, hey, this is all real stuff, I can use this to act with the kids and really get legitimately angry at them. And toy with them and throw their little youth culture right back in their face, which is what Freddy does. So, the old acting trick is, you just remember that moment and I can be back there. ‘Damn Johnny Depp with his full head of hair and little Heather Langenkamp with her perk little boobies.’ And I can get back into (the anger) immediately. And I used that for all eight movies.”
Regarding the humor in the sequels and his favorite performance as Freddy:
“Wes was a little perturbed that we exploited the humor. But it’s all through(out) Nightmare 1. My tongue came out of a phone, ‘I’m your boyfriend now’. I wear Tina’s face, I cut my fingers off and green goo spurts out of them. Freddy’s having fun. He’s like the cat that toys with a bird before he kills it. So, I think, I like my performance in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the best. (Director) Renny Harlin left me alone and I got to dance a little bit. I was able to be the kind of Freddy I wanted to be. But other movies have my favorite Freddy moments. Nightmare 4 doesn’t necessarily have my favorite Freddy moments. I think 7 (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) is the best and it’s got so much of Wes’s heart in it. 1 is the scariest. And I think if you took a vote, I think NOES 3: The Dream Warriors is the fan favorite. ‘Welcome to prime time!’ But (in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge), I have a line mistake. It’s a great line. ‘You’re all my children now.’ I said it wrong in the movie. It should be ‘You’re all my children now.’ Not your damn parents. I hit the wrong word. And you have to live with it the rest of your life.”
On his favorite kill from the series:
“I love wiping the ceiling with Tina (Amanda Wyss, A Nightmare on Elm Street), that’s some nasty stuff. I love the boy with his tendons and the puppet strings (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors). But I also love, just because it’s so politically incorrect, I love the boy with the hearing aid (Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare). Freddy don’t care if you’re special needs, he’ll come get ya. He’s an equal opportunity killer. (‘Nice hearing from ya, Carlos!’)”
On the rumored screenplay he wrote for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Freddy’s Funhouse:
“Well, that wasn’t my title. There’s a rumor, and you have to take everything on the internet with a grain of salt, because fifty percent of it is complete BS, about John Saxon (Nancy’s father, Lt. Thompson) writing that script. I wrote a script for Nightmare 3 and I worked really hard on it and it was about Tina’s sister, a college girl, a journalism major, who wanted to get to the bottom of her sister’s death and the technology I was using through my draft was microfiche. That was the recurring image in my movie and she was trying to get to the bottom (of Tina’s death). What happened is she would use the microfilm and it would start to expand into real film and you would learn the real story of Fred Krueger and the first kills. That was my title, The First Kills. (On parts of it being incorporated into the pilot episode, ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy.’ for Freddy’s Nightmares) Obviously. By the time they got around to doing the series, they’d been sitting around with my script in a drawer for three years. That’s Hollywood, that’s the way it works.”
On a sequel to Freddy vs. Jason:
“Guys, we were going to do Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash at one point in time. But the company got sold. New Line Cinema got sold to Time Warner. New Line owned the Friday the 13th franchise and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise and obviously A Nightmare on Elm Street. So the idea was, these were classics, that Michael Bay and his company, Platinum Dunes, would reboot all three franchises. And they did a really good job with Friday the 13th (2009), not so successful with Nightmare (2010), and they did a decent Texas Chainsaw. They want to remake them all. They don’t want to put the cart before the horse and start doing these graphic novel ideas, Freddy vs. Chucky, God forbid!”
“(In A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge), I have a line mistake. It’s a great line. ‘You’re all my children now.’ I said it wrong in the movie. It should be ‘You’re all my children now.’ Not your damn parents. I hit the wrong word. And you have to live with it the rest of your life.”
On the Rick and Morty version of Freddy, “Scary Terry”, and other interpretations:
“I love what (Dan Harmon)’s done. And there comes a point when we all have to surrender stuff to others. I’m a Hollywood kid and I know that. People get worried about sequels? Well, I don’t want to live in a world without Aliens. But I love some of the cartoon variations. That’s me on The Simpsons. Freddy’s on South Park. The South Park Freddy is crazy. (In a Chris Farley voice) ‘He lives out in the woods, down by a river in a van.’ And he’s on Family Guy. Freddy’s been around. I love when everybody pushes it and plays with it. And it’s not always right for me to do the voice because sometimes they want that snotty Seth MacFarlane voice.”
On his new Travel Channel show:
“I cleared my calendar for July to do my new show. It was called Shadows of History then, now it’s called True Terror with Robert Englund. (It) is all based on things from newspapers that are strange and weird and dark and occult. They’re not urban legends, they’re real enough and sourced enough that they wound up in newspapers. Things like people being buried alive, really cool stuff like that. But now it got pushed because they need to get all the re-enactments so that I can narrate them and then I do my stuff on camera. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it until December. The first three episodes I read they’re great, it’s a fun show.”
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