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MOVIE FEATURE

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The method to Cage’s MADNESS Stories of Cage’s method acting are etched in Hollywood lore, such as the time he had his front teeth pulled out for the film Birdy (1984) so that his face looked pummelled. One of his grossest method moments came while filming the 1988 movie Vampire’s Kiss . Hot off the success of the Oscar-winning Moonstruck (1987), Cage dived deep into his character, who believed himself to be a vampire despite no physical signs of that supernatural status. When his character eats live cockroaches, Cage did indeed chow down on actual live, wriggling roaches. Disgusting!

Nicolas Cage has long been fascinated by the dark and macabre, so naturally he was in his element portraying Renfield 's Dracula on location in New Orleans. Words Gill Pringle U nsurprisingly, the actor didn’t hesitate in agreeing to play the iconic character in Chris McKay’s action-comedy-horror with a tone that I really admired ever since I saw An American Werewolf in London . If you can hit that bullseye of comedy and horror, you’ve got something

Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde attended Trinity College in Dublin together, and remained close friends for many years. DYK?

Lugosi as the aristocratic vampire and Dwight Frye as Renfield. “We needed some backstory on their relationship, and I wanted a shout-out to the original Dracula and Bela Lugosi,” explains McKay. “What better way to connect the backstory of our hero’s relationship to Dracula than to

Renfield . Inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula , the film stars Nicholas Hoult in the titular role along with Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. McKay couldn’t believe his luck when Cage signed on. “From the first moment that I talked to him, he was super enthusiastic,” the director reveals. “He's a big cinephile, so he knows movies and loves horror. He loves Dracula movies, and Christopher Lee is his favourite, so that was something we shared when we were talking about this role. “But the thing that was most important to me is that there's always going to be a human side to Dracula. And somebody like Cage - who has done every kind

quite special and quite delicious.” Before the New Orleans shoot

began, McKay had an ingenious idea about how Renfield might open: by compositing the new movie’s Renfield and Dracula characters into classic Universal vampire films. He began at the very beginning, with Tod Browning’s black-and-white Dracula starring Bela

place him directly in the original 1931 Dracula film? We shot a lot more than what ended up in the final film. Nic and Nicholas did almost all of the lines from the initial meeting between Lugosi and Dwight Frye. The actors - and the VFX team - did an incredible job recreating those classic moments.” But in McKay’s new take, Hoult’s Renfield is looking to escape from a century’s servitude to history’s most narcissistic boss - forced to procure his master’s prey and do his every bidding - and is ready to see if there’s a life outside the shadow of the Prince of Darkness. Having created possibly the most bloody Dracula film ever made,

of film and worked with some of the best filmmakers in the world - I knew he could find a way to make our Dracula both a love bombing, gaslighting narcissist who menaces Renfield, but also somebody who has vulnerability himself.” When Cage first read the Renfield script, he was impressed with the originality of the premise. “I thought this was a new way of going about it,” the actor says, “and that it would give us a chance to play

McKay comments, “I think that Renfield is meant to be over-the-top and outrageous. And so that's why, incredibly, there’s fountains of blood coming out of someone's body… That’s why we were able to do that and, absolutely, in animation, you can get away with lots of things, and really push the envelope.”

• Renfield is out on Sep 13

12 SEPTEMBER 2023

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