Well, Robert's always been very authentic.
He is a total rock star.
Criminally underappreciated.
He's Shakespearean.
He's a very serious actor,
but he's also a great comedian.
Robert, as a fellow actor, is a dream.
Robert Englund's a great actor.
It's as plain as that.
Fasten your seat belts.
Okay, I'm ready.
Okay.
I never set out to become a horror icon.
It's something I wasn't planning.
It's just something that happened.
I went right into the makeup tests
and that's sort of where I found
a lot of the character and the voice.
Johnny Depp waltzed in about a week into the shooting
and Heather looking all beautiful and young and dewy.
And there was the makeup girl
with little pink fans she bought them:
"We have to keep our stars cool."
What am I, chopped liver? And I'm sitting over there.
I've been working since five in the morning.
I'm itchy. I've got glue all over me,
the makeup man, David Miller,
stabbing me with this crusty makeup brush,
and I'm kinda pissed at the kids.
They don't need makeup. They're beautiful.
They've got their whole careers ahead of them.
God, I envy those little... And I went, "Wait a minute.
That envy, that jealousy I have
for those beautiful young actors," I said,
"I can use that. What is Freddy?
He's a child killer. What are children?
Children are the future."
So for the rest of the movies,
I was able just to remember that moment,
that little synapse of mine.
I can get there, just like I got there now.
And that's all I need to believe in Freddy,
just to get back to that little moment.
And that becomes my shorthand getting to an essence of Freddy
that I need to get to without just going
"Booga, booga, booga," you know.
Robbie Englund was sort of preordained to be a lawyer.
This is what my father wanted.
He knew I had the gift of gab, and I broke my father's heart.
I believe it was either my 11th or my 12th summer,
I was sent off as a chaperone
of my mother's best friend's gorgeous teenage daughter.
She was a wannabe actress, and a year older than I was.
So we went to this professional children's theater together
and I figured I was going to be sweeping the stage
and having a flashlight and ushering people in.
And it's a big transition in life.
You go from being...
literally from being a child to the teenage world,
but it was also this world of theater
that I entered that summer,
and I wound up starring in everything.
I was Pinocchio, I was Peter Pan, I was Aladdin.
And at some point that summer, I was in the girls' bathroom.
And the girls were teaching me how to blow smoke rings.
They were the harem girls. And I'm sitting there,
and I had curly hair, to begin with,
but they were like giving me a perm.
I'm full of screaming hormones.
Twelve years old, I had a breast in this ear,
a boob in this ear, a belly button right here,
as the girls touched me and played with me
and curled me and rolled my hair.
And I've got a cigarette and I sort of said to myself,
"I like this. I think I'm gonna do this."
I had this sequence where Pinocchio's in shorts,
lederhosen,
and I would run across the stage mugging "Oh, no."
And the Indians would follow me and shoot arrows at me.
And then I'd run back the other way.
Well, during the run of the show,
every time I came back for my second run across the stage,
I would add an extra arrow or two,
and the laugh got bigger.
I had arrows in my ass now; even a bigger laugh.
Well, I got to love that laugh. That was mine.
I controlled it, I'd enhanced it,
and I really loved it.
I went off stage and there were guests backstage.
And one of the guests backstage was none other than
the great improvisational talk show host Steve Allen.
Anyway, I know many of you want to know
what kind of a show we'll be doing here on Sundays.
I know I... I'd like to know.
But this is like the late-night
talk show in the world.
The Tonight Show before Johnny Carson,
and I idolized him.
And he had... a friend's daughter was in the show,
and he'd come back,
going to give her a bunch of roses,
and he'd saved a rose.
I heard this voice,
"Where's the kid that plays Pinocchio?"
He goes, "Oh, there's the puppet."
And he gave me the rose and he said, "You got it, kid."
I'm literally a kid. I'm 13 years old.
To get that kind of vote of confidence...
You know, grownups were not afraid in those days
to tell you you were special, or you had a gift, you know.
They weren't worried about being sued by
the Board of Education or your parents,
because your parents wanted you to be an engineer
or a lawyer or a doctor.
A lawyer in my case, and I, you know,
my parents kind of knew.
I'd like to introduce you to one of your sons.
- Oh. - This is Adam, Rob. Lester.
- Lester. - Lester. Pleasure to meet ya.
What's so touching about Robert is that
maybe we're with a group of people
and there might be someone who's new to the acting world.
He'll immediately say to them, "Oh, I saw you when you were
in that after-school special when you were 14 years old,"
and he makes you feel like you're one of the club.
I think one of the things
that you realize if you start
to last a while in the business
is that every year there's a fresh crop of people
who are breaking into it
who don't know as much as the veterans do,
and Robert was always teaching.
We figured out how to do it
safely. - Yeah.
Run, like Peter Cushing
in Horror of Dracula. - Right. Okay.
Run on the table
and jump over the fire... - Right.
...and then land with a sword and, "Stand back.
He's mine." - Yeah. Argh. Boom.
This was my first time directing.
I was fucking scared.
I mean, this is Robert Englund.
This is Lin Shaye. This is big time.
Robert put his arm around me, and he gets real close,
and he's like, "I know you're nervous.
Don't be. You come to me for anything."
He set the tone.
All right, picture.
Enough, guys. Quiet.
Here we go, guys.
I'd just wrapped, you know, everybody did the...
the big clap, you know.
And I was heading to my hotel, and I heard "Corey."
And I turn and I look,
and in one of the side rooms was Robert.
He goes, "Come in here.
I think you really have a lot of talent.
And it'd be really cool for you to keep going and do that."
He's like, "You did a really good job,"
and I just went...
To me, it was like, such a great compliment
from an amazingly accomplished actor.
And it takes a really generous person
to actually turn that spotlight onto all the people around him.
I just think that's really rare in... in... in Hollywood.
Robert knew from an early age
that he was talented at this.
It wasn't just a hobby.
It was something he was,
not only that he loved, but that he was good at.
The reason you would discourage a child
from being an actor is because it's a pretty sketchy,
scary way to make money.
My parents sent me off with... with...
with good tidings to the teenage drama workshop.
It was a shock to me later on
to find out they didn't want me to pursue it.
And I had been recruited by Stanford,
and I didn't want to go there.
They didn't have a particularly great
theatre department or anything else.
It really damaged the relationship, I think,
with my father;
not my mother so much, but my father, and...
you know, that his son was going to,
"Hey diddle-dee-dee. An actor's life for me."
You know, I don't think he wanted that.
I think he worried for me.
I don't think they disapproved of acting per se.
They just recognized that it was a really tough job.
I did all the traditional academic training.
I did Julius Caesar,
and I did Playboy of the Western World.
I was doing classics now as well as I did, not Dracula,
but I played Jonathan Harker, the young man whose girlfriend
is suffering the effects of the vampire.
I looked like a kind of skinny, big Adam apple,
Danny Kaye back then.
Of course, I was, you know, ripped because I was a surfer
and I had long blonde hair, but I was hardly a leading man.
He was a very plain kid.
I mean, he was, he's not the Robert we see now.
I don't know what the hell I meant by that,
but, you know, they were...
they were kinder to plain-lookin' people.
I was pretty plain.
My audition in college, I followed Richard Dreyfuss,
who had done an Edward Albee monologue.
And that was like, just amazing.
And I knew enough not to follow him.
I took my name off the list
because I knew I could never top his...
it was just, he was brilliant.
He in fact, dropped out a couple of weeks later,
and he actually told me, you know,
"You got to get out of here."
And so, we went off and formed
our own theatre company in Hollywood.
I left home.
I wasn't speaking to my parents anymore
and I was living in the basement of a theater.
Girls were opening the trapdoor in the theater floor
and lowering me down doughnuts and French fries.
I was broke.
We were all broke and living with girls.
Every girl I seemed to meet that was single in New York
had a cat with a stinky-ass cat box,
and the whole apartment smelled like cat shit.
You know, you'd sleep on her couch
until she got tired of you.
And then we'd get a job and everybody like, like,
fucking smoke signals and drums knew you had a job.
They'd walk up to you and go, "Hey, I heard, man."
Can I have a little more light, please?
Let's see, I met Robert back in 1972, I think it was, or '73,
and got to know each other well, and we had a lot of fun.
Just a bunch of crazy guys on stage,
all kinds of shenanigans going on.
I remember going to a party
with all the football players.
And there were like ten guys for every one girl at the party.
And all the guys got really sick and drunk
and throwing up from the beer kegs.
And the next weekend, I was invited to
a drama department party.
And it was ten girls for every one guy.
Not beer kegs but mixing cocktails.
And there weren't a lot of straight guys there.
Kind of a "don't ask, don't tell" time.
And I, it was... that was a very exotic,
kind of eye-opening experience for me.
Another perk about being in the theater is
you're like playing many different characters
during the course of a two-and-a-half-hour play.
What happens invariably is that you run off
to the side of the stage, and you all strip
and you put on your next costume.
And you could be standing right next to a young lady
- who was stripping. - Really?
Not that you were paying any attention,
but, you know, occasionally you just kind of...
glance like that. That's probably not...
it's... it's probably not...
um, I shouldn't say that nowadays.
That about does that for me.
I went back to college after that
and was very successful there,
and that's the beginning of my professional life.
But I became dissatisfied and disaffected
with the politics of theater.
I was naive enough to think the theater was free of that
and pure and... and fairness prevailed,
and of course it's just like any other business.
And I returned to Hollywood.
Betsy, my first wife. We were high school sweethearts.
I can still remember seeing her, you know,
get in my car in high school
to take her to the movies, with her, you know,
her surfer girl sun-streaked hair,
and her sunburned, you know, shoulders,
and I was kind of a bad boy.
And then we patched it up.
And then I went off to go to college.
And then she wound up at that college,
and we sort of came back together again.
I think I'd... I'd... I'd matured just enough
that I thought maybe, maybe,
maybe Betsy and I are meant to be, you know.
We'd known each other for so long, it felt like...
when you're young, it felt like forever.
And so, we made a go of it.
I don't think she ever understood
how serious I was about being an actor,
how much I loved it,
and I was so sure of what I wanted and what I needed.
I think Betsy kind of wanted us to, you know,
come back to California and have a house
and a picket fence and babies. We tried, but we just...
we were just different people by then.
And you know, I, you know, we were very young then
and that can damage a marriage.
And I think we just changed, not necessarily grew apart,
because we had a very amicable divorce.
You know, we just got married too young.
I had retained an agent who'd seen me doing Hello, Dolly,
and I went on my first interview,
and I got a starring role in a movie.
1973, Buster and Billie,
which was sort of a strange,
romantic, and brutal true story
about a couple of teenagers in the American South,
post-World War Two.
He definitely made an impression on me,
even at that age.
He didn't look like a movie actor
and the performance was really special.
And it's not a genre film in any way.
It's a coming-of-age drama, but it's kind of intense.
I beat out a ton of people for that part.
I found out later, some of the people that...
that were up to that role, that Who's Who in Hollywood.
I had this great Emmy award-winning makeup man,
Del Armstrong, and my character was an albino
who idolized and sidekicked this, this older boy.
In the form of the very hunky Jan Michael Vincent.
Well, you're talkin' to the Lone Ranger here.
I ride alone, kemo sabe.
My albino character doesn't like being an albino
and he dyes his hair black, uses shoe polish.
We wanted it to look like an old crew cut,
but my hair doesn't do that.
We go to this great Russian wig maker
in the San Fernando Valley,
and she's got an entire mantelpiece
full of Emmy awards and Oscars.
And there in this room is John Wayne's hair
and Jimmy Stewart's hair.
She's got everybody's hairpiece and everybody's toupee.
She tried a couple of them on me.
And Alan Arkin had just done Catch-22.
Well, I got Alan Arkin's toupee.
And we're going to wear contact lenses
to make my eyes pink.
First day starring in a movie, I get the contact lenses in,
and they're colored pink to show that my eyes are green.
Pink and green together make brown.
I look more like an albino
with my own eyes. And if I squint a little bit,
then it's... it works, you know. So I'm in my first movie now,
and I gotta get my courage with the director.
And I go, "Dan, this just doesn't look right to me.
I don't know if I can act in these things."
And he goes, "Robert, take them out.
They don't look right. Your own eyes are good.
The windows of the soul."
First minute on a set, pop them out,
my eyes stop watering, action, nailed the first scene.
Again it's that thing, it's that an adult,
someone famous, someone tried and true and tested
listening to you.
And that's why they're good,
because they know when to listen and telling me that,
and now my confidence is through the ceiling.
They had the after party of my premiere
at Chasen's in Beverly Hills, which is the restaurant
and it was like Who's Who of show business in there
at any given night.
My father went without me. I couldn't attend
because I was doing another job. I was off on location.
My father really kind of saw this world
and realized that I was doing really well in it.
But it was I think just seeing the family name,
single card that really touched him.
And we were off and running.
It's fun now to go back through
Robert's early movies.
I actually appreciated Robert from the very beginning.
Is it a cop?
You're gonna wish I was.
At that time, Robert was building
a nice gallery of characters as a character actor.
I was a character actor in the theater,
and I was a character actor on film,
and I understand those roles.
So I get best friend, pissant cowboy,
scuzzy little junky boy,
and I'm getting lots and lots of screen time with those roles.
Hands on the counter, asshole.
I did a little filler job
for the great American director Robert Aldrich who did
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
and The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds.
They did this movie called the Hustle.
Real, dirty, dark contemporary noir,
and I'm hired to play the guy that kills Burt Reynolds
in the end, this just sort of random killing.
And one of the shots they want is that Dirty Harry shot,
that great camera looking down the barrel of a gunshot.
Prop man put in too much of a load.
So when they get back for the shot of me
actually shooting Burt,
Burt's a couple of feet away from me. I fire the gun
and Burt's toupee goes...
"Whoo, whoo, whoo."
I didn't even know Burt wore a toupee then.
I'm like, "Oh my god."
Burt invites me into his trailer.
Burt pours me a shot of Bushmills.
Burt says, "Now, kid, don't worry about that.
That wasn't your fault."
He goes, "You gotta be as mean and pimply
and junky as you can be.
Because the meaner and nastier you are,
the more the audience is going to feel bad about my death."
And this is the biggest star of the '70s telling me this,
someone of power and major stardom
speaking to me one on one, making me feel good,
taking this pressure off me after that horrible accident.
We go back in, and we shoot it.
Get in! Come on!
And it's a great moment in the film.
The first time I noticed Robert Englund in a movie
was in Bob Rafelson's Stay Hungry.
Now, from the man who directed Five Easy Pieces
comes Stay Hungry, an extraordinary new film
that takes you into a fascinating world.
It was like Who's Who.
The great Bob Rafelson,
who had just come off of Five Easy Pieces.
Jeff Bridges, one of his early great roles.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know,
and I know Arnold Schwarzenegger has done a brief cameo
in a Robert Altman movie called The Long Goodbye,
and he's done a documentary called Pumping Iron,
which is the beginning of the fitness fad worldwide.
And this movie is the first movie to address that.
Lots and lots of wonderful people.
And me, I'm one of the stars.
I'm like fourth or fifth billing.
Robert played a bodybuilder in that.
Tank top and all.
He's a little guy but, you know, he'd been a swimmer.
What you trying to say?
Thor didn't tell me nothing about it.
Well, he told me.
It's better if you don't have nothing on your stomach.
There were wonderful actors in that film,
and just this amazing crosscurrent
of Hollywood culture, the '60s and the '70s
all coming together.
As Jimmy Karen said, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger
before he could say money.
Arnold, who was like, this is at the absolute peak
of his beauty as this sculpted man.
And Arnold's brilliant and funny.
We all came back to Hollywood.
We were going to help Arnold out
because we all fell in love with him.
Arnold already, through his endorsements from bodybuilding,
owned what is considered Ocean Park now.
He was such a shrewd, savvy businessman.
So, immediately, we all realize
he was already vastly successful.
It's hard to give up. I'd rather stay hungry.
I remember walking through onto this set,
and there were tumbleweeds
and a two-story Victorian wooden rundown house
that was supposedly in the desert somewhere in Texas.
And then, in the on the porch,
there was a monkey with bald spots all over
and picking his hair, and he was mad,
and he was rattling in his cage.
It was one of those roadside attraction places
that they had in the '40s
in that kind of newly mobile national highway system USA.
"Last stop for gas, 500 yards on the right,
see the giant iguana and the bats from hell."
So it's one of those places off on this side road
where obviously Tobe Hooper's families, and guests,
and victims will show up.
Eaten Alive was my first horror film,
and it was called Death Trap.
We had to change the title because of the famous play.
I get this part.
And you have to remember in the '70s,
my go-to stereotype was redneck,
Western, neutral sidekick.
And so I did my little pissant cowboy and I got the role.
Get off my property!
Aw, look at that, done ruffled his feathers.
Eaten Alive was awesome.
You know, 'cause I'm a big Tobe Hooper fan
and I didn't realize it was Robert until,
of course, you know, after the fact
and looking back on stuff.
Howdy, ma'am? The name's Buck.
We had to finish the movie without Tobe.
Talk around the set was it had something to do with
Tobe not making it violent enough.
Tobe Hooper? You know, leave him alone.
You'll... you'll see it when he edits together.
The only thing I regret is I had to really wrestle
with a giant rubber alligator.
The day we were going to do
the scene with making love and...
and then him getting up and going outside
and getting eaten, that was the nude scene for me.
And that's the day the producer comes in and goes,
"Gotta tell you something.
Tobe Hooper's not going to be here to direct this."
He goes, "I am," and I went, "Oh, my, no."
I was really scared.
But Robert was really supportive.
He was really there for me because I was really nervous.
He kept me calm.
Something about him just made me feel at ease.
Yeah, apparently in the Japanese release,
there's actually in the middle of one of my scenes,
they go beyond and there's actually like
a sexual insert shot.
No pun intended.
Oh, okay.
And... and I'm telling everyone right now,
it's not me. It's not me.
Name's Buck. I'm raring to fuck.
Let's just get it over with.
I sort of thought we could, uh, try something new.
"My name's Buck and I'm here to fuck."
I didn't even realize that's where Quentin got it
for Kill Bill.
So you're starting to see Robert's influence
echoing through pop culture.
My name's Buck and I'm here to fuck.
I auditioned for Kill Bill for the orderly.
Quentin has told me he loves Eaten Alive.
He has a great aesthetic for grindhouse,
and I have a nice talk with Quentin.
And my first take was not what he wanted.
But then I had to do it again.
And I... it was so dim that I put on my reading glasses.
And I put on my reading glasses and it really... it changes me.
You know, and I become the, you know,
the druggist at the store or something, at the pharmacy.
So, Quentin, confused, he hired me.
My name's Buck
and I'm here to fuck.
Mornin', Beebo! I'm feelin' lucky!
I'm starvin'.
The third of the trio of '70s Southern rednecks
that I played was Last of the Cowboys,
also known as The Great Smokey Roadblock.
You have to remember,
trucking movies were real big in the '70s.
Keep on truckin'.
I had the honor of starring with the great Henry Fonda,
arguably one of the best actors in American film history.
Also in that film,
I had a lovely young leading lady, Susan Sarandon,
in one of her earlier roles.
It was sort of a double whammy for me,
this, uh, this working character actor
getting to work with one of America's greatest film actors
and soon-to-be Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon.
I had met William Katt at a Saturday audition,
and it was my third or fourth callback for Carrie.
Creepy Carrie! Creepy Carrie!
They were liking me for the John Travolta role.
And I believe that day it was myself,
William Katt, and Nancy Allen,
who eventually married Brian DePalma.
Obviously, Travolta got the part
and was fabulous in it.
Young Robert Englund was obsessed with George Lucas
and Zoetrope and Francis Ford Coppola.
We idolized these guys.
And we had heard rumors about Apocalypse Now
in the acting community,
and I managed to wrangle an audition.
And I wanted to read for the cook.
I dressed military. I had a tank top on,
an old green military thrift shop tank top,
wife-beater,
and I had dog tags and I was 170 pounds of muscle.
I had an old military shirt with the sleeves rolled up
on over my sleeveless t-shirt.
So I had a kind of cool look about me.
They said, "No, you're too young."
They looked at me for a minute and said,
"You know, they may want to see you across the hall.
George Lucas is working on a new project."
Scene four, take one.
Chick's out again, there's no mistake.
You can't find a major?
I found it, it's just... it's just not there.
George Lucas and Brian De Palma
were casting at the same time.
So all those casting sessions, they held it together
and I think they saw every up-and-coming
young actor and young actress in Hollywood at the time.
They wanted Han Solo to originally be kind of
like a cool older uncle.
You know, that kind of guy that would, you know,
give you your first beer.
Now they were kind of bobbing and weaving.
They didn't know whether to keep it older
or maybe have Han be somebody almost Luke's age, you know.
It could be a contemporary of Luke's
but you know, a bad boy.
Over my dead body.
Now that we have seen Harrison Ford as Han Solo,
you cannot picture anybody else in that role.
I'm sure Robert would have given a great performance.
But it's just like asking,
"Can you picture somebody else as Freddy Krueger?"
You have nothing to worry about.
Immediately, they thought I was too young.
And they took a Polaroid of me, I think,
and maybe they filmed me with, you know,
with a lampshade off on Super 8. I can't remember.
But I do remember there being a table in there
and I saw the sides for Luke Skywalker.
I didn't have sides. They just took a picture of me.
I didn't even read for Han.
But I stole the sides for Luke Skywalker.
I get home and my girlfriend's in the back bedroom typing away.
She's working on a script that would later become Lost Boys.
Mark Hamill, my buddy. Always at our house.
And Mark's entrée was always,
he always brought a six-pack of Heineken.
And I come in and I... I... I gave him the sides.
I said, "Mark, you might really be right for this."
He got on the phone with his agent,
got an interview I think that very next day.
Went in, and the rest is history.
We have to find the rebels.
What we're carrying belongs to them.
Mark Hamill...
Darn him! It was almost mine. It was that...
It's... it's a great '70s moment
for how everything came together and blended together
and how things bounced off each other.
You know, it's just interesting how that all works.
Well, back in the '70s, I wasn't working constantly,
and there were some unemployment checks.
Sometimes I'd help out friends
in front of and behind the camera.
My neighbor who lived downstairs
worked with Tommy Lee Wallace and John Carpenter.
And I offered to help him one day.
He wanted me to gather leaves
and stuff them in garbage bags, to all these dead leaves
from the gutter and the streets so he could go off,
throw them in front of a camera
and have them blow through the air
in front of a lovely young actress named Jamie Lee Curtis
in another iconic '70s movie... Halloween.
I professionally knew what Robert was up to
and watched his career grow.
We were all kind of growing at the same time.
But obviously, I didn't really have an opportunity
to spend time with him again until we did Big Wednesday.
Big Wednesday,
the day you face your own biggest challenge.
The day you risk it all.
I had idolized some of those surfers as a child,
that... whose story Big Wednesday is.
And John Milius,
the great John Milius, the writer/director,
was also at Malibu
at that special, special moment of time.
John directed it and... and cast all of us in this...
another tribe of guys
that was living on that ribbon of life
right on the coast during the '60s.
So it's his memory,
but I remember some of what he remembered.
We... we're not that too far off in age.
It wasn't so much about the party scene,
but it was about tasty waves.
So we would always hunt,
so you'd have to get in your car and run up and down the coast.
That was my life.
And I know, I know Robert shared that kind of life
for a long time.
So when I met Robert,
I remember there was a perfect thing
because he shakes hands when somebody's going off to war,
and he has lines, so when I met Robert the first time,
I shook his hand and I said, "Stay casual, Barlow."
Stay casual, Barlow.
But what was fascinating about it was
he didn't go "Oh, I'm glad you've seen
one of my other movies."
What he said was, very seriously,
"Oh, I love that movie."
Robert has this wonderful speaking voice.
He was the narrator of Big Wednesday,
which a lot of people don't know.
In the old days, I remember a wind
that would blow down through the canyons.
It was a hot wind called a Santana.
The narration was so rhapsodic and beautiful,
and Robert spoke it so wonderfully.
My friends and I would sleep in our cars
and the smell of the offshore wind
would often wake us.
I... I kind of pinched my nose for it,
just a little bit.
"I remember the three friends," you know, and "Santa Ana winds."
I didn't get it to... I didn't dude it like...
like Sean Penn. I didn't go full, "Dude."
Oh, gnarly!
But I did just put enough of it on it,
but I also wanted it to be
as if it was a remembrance of things past
and give it the kind of class that...
the gentle poetry in the narration required
that John Milius had written.
It was about... their friendship was the film,
and it was another guy standing just outside of that,
talking about their friendship.
I hadn't done a part that small in ten years.
I had worked at Warner Brothers a lot.
I felt comfortable taking a pay cut.
And I know that story that they told.
Big Wednesday for me
is literally the last day of my youth.
This is the road to Potter's Bluff.
Maybe you've been there.
Clean, picturesque, full of old-fashioned friendliness.
I met Robert Englund in some casting sessions
when I was casting some television projects
in Los Angeles.
But Gary's hired me several times.
I mean, we did that... we had done Mysterious Two,
the television movie.
And Robert came in and I found him really interesting
as an actor and as a person.
I just really liked him.
And I really went to the wall to convince everybody
that this guy could hold his own against Noah Beery.
Reverend MacLeish?
You know, whose name was on that tent permit?
Yeah.
Well, he up and died six months before it was issued.
And I was right.
And he did, and he was absolutely fantastic.
And then I hired Robert again on Dead & Buried.
By the time I saw Dead & Buried
for the first time, I was already a big Robert Englund fan
and just so excited to see him outside of Freddy.
Any chance I could see him outside of Freddy,
I was just fascinated.
Did you get a good gander at that face, Danny?
Yes, Harry, I did.
I actually tailored that part for him.
Actually, I don't even think in the...
in an earlier draft that Harry had a name.
He was just the tow truck driver,
and he just had a few scenes.
And what we did was, you know, what I did is I sat down
and I expanded the part of... of Harry and gave it to Robert.
Gary was wonderful with all of us,
you know, and we were kind of, like, treated like an ensemble.
It was still that moment of time in Hollywood,
where even if you had a small role,
they wouldn't bring you in for two days
and work you really hard.
You'd be run of the show.
So I was there for the whole shoot.
Listen, I just pulled a late-model Ford
out of the water down by the south beach.
Yeah?
It appears she come off the bluff.
When we were doing the setup,
he had the kid's airplane in his hand,
and he was sitting there flicking the propeller.
It was almost kind of an ad-lib of his, and I said,
"That's great."
That's the thing about Robert,
is that his dialogue delivery is so natural.
It's just so real.
The great Jack Albertson is in that movie.
Lisa Blount plays this sort of death nurse in that,
and really, I think that may be
the original death nurse performance
in the genre of films.
And what's funny is the character
who gets the needle in his eye, his name was Freddy.
Stan Winston also worked that film,
the great Stan Winston.
That was one of my very early effects makeup experiences.
It's also one of my favorite posters of any film I've done.
And occasionally I'll get a European version of that poster
with beautiful signing,
you know, at one of the conventions.
It's just an amazing poster, kind of a classic.
Roger Corman had just purchased some warehouses
in Venice, California.
So it was... all these warehouses had been converted
into Rogers's new low-budget studio.
Roger was doing sci-fi, getting... getting in
on that sci-fi bandwagon.
He knew what the audiences wanted.
Prepare yourself for...
...Galaxy of Terror.
I did Galaxy of Terror
because there was going to be an actors' strike.
I had the shittiest, crappiest little dressing room.
It was like two theater flats, pin-hinged together,
couple of bent coat hangers hanging on a dowel,
and a little stained plastic chair.
That was my dressing room.
Across from me was a little makeshift office
for the art department.
And there was a guy
with scraggly long blond hair in there,
and he would be drawing all the time
creatures for the show, and he was the art director.
And he would throw balls of paper out
and I would grab them and open them up;
they were great drawings.
Well, the guy was James Cameron,
who went on to some success.
And he'd covered the walls in Styrofoam boxes
from the dumpsters, like... it looked like...
it looked as good as Star Wars.
What is it?
Nothing.
I keep seeing something... then nothing.
I've been a huge Robert Englund fan for a long time,
but the first time I saw him was in Galaxy of Terror,
which is a... this little sci-fi gem
that a lot of people don't know about, which annoys me.
Of all my movies,
Galaxy of Terror and Ford Fairlane
have the two craziest pop culture casts.
We had the star of Happy Days, Erin Moran,
Grace Zabriskie from Twin Peaks, Ray Walston,
and then the great, late Sid Haig.
I live and I die by the crystals.
Sid was, you know, just a sweetheart.
I was off to do my Vietnam movie,
Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder.
Sid had done a hundred movies in the Philippines,
and Sid wrote down all these places for me to go,
the best sushi bar, the best Chinese restaurant.
He was like this sort of like,
back then for me, just sort of like a mentor,
big brother, about, you know, the crazy world of
being a character actor internationally,
which was about to happen for me.
You know, Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder,
I call it my Vietnam movie.
And it's a true story.
The boy it's about
was actually the technical adviser
on Apocalypse Now.
It's really, I think, a worthy, amazing,
and an important story about the other aspect of Vietnam,
which is why Francis Ford Coppola insisted
that Paul Henssler, who wrote this project
about his life, make it into a film.
My character is into taking drugs.
He's a very confused and misguided
and a very unhappy person
because of the situation that he finds himself in,
doing autopsies on casualties in Vietnam.
My name was Tripper
because I was an ambulance driver,
and I was sort of this stoner.
One of the things that we know now about Vietnam,
is a lot of young men went that far from home,
and that was the first place they'd ever been high,
because drugs were everywhere.
So that was sort of my character.
The guys that just kept themselves
lightly buzzed all the time.
Ain't she a little young for you, Brian?
Goddammit, haven't you ever heard of knockin'?
We just clicked right away.
He's a very impassioned actor
and I was too, so it was a perfect match.
Dennis just sort of taught me how to go on location.
And I had big cases that musicians travel with.
And he had a couple of things from home that he needed.
I remember he had silver framed pictures of...
of... of his friends and his family.
I brought a boom box with me with two speakers.
I know that Robert checked this out
and was very like, "Whoa, look how you roll." You know?
Dennis and I went into town one night,
and Dennis had cut the sleeves
off of one of the military shirts.
And that's... we were on a... on a pub crawl,
and we got arrested because Dennis got busted.
You're not allowed to mutate the uniform.
I remember the guards, the MPs got us,
and Dennis says, "You can't arrest us.
We're movie stars."
"Dennis, that's not going to work."
What?
And Susan St. James got us out,
and I think she had to promise some DJ...
she was going to be DJ
on Armed Services Radio in the Philippines.
You know, she had to like, you know,
a bunch of tapes with her.
Hi, this is Susan St. James,
and you're listening to the Eagles here on KNAVYN.
Or something like that.
We hung out quite a lot and had a good time, yeah,
trying to find these guys
and to not make this a morality tale about
the sweet Americans who were saving orphans in Vietnam.
It's really, I think,
a worthy and amazing and an important story
about the other aspect of Vietnam.
There's a great deal of resonance in it today,
of what you do with the collateral damage.
And is it collateral damage or are they people?
And of course... the creatures!
Television at the time of V
was mostly something I didn't pay much attention to.
I loved movies, TV was kind of the same old same old
all the time, and then along comes V.
Suddenly, we're talking about lizard aliens
underneath human skin splitting open and the like,
and I loved it.
V was about this alien species that has come here
supposedly to be our friends,
but they have a dark agenda just like the Nazis did,
when they rolled into northern Europe.
I have a dear friend, and he was...
he was close to the casting director,
Phyllis Hoffman.
And Phyllis had brought me in on several projects
and brought me in for V.
It was to play this alien
who had a proclivity for malapropping,
for using the wrong word to mean another word.
So I was going to be comedy relief, and I go,
"That's a lot to parcel right there."
Robert walked in, and I thought,
"Oh, this is just so right. He looks so right."
So we started reading together and it was like, bang,
this is the guy that I had in my mind
when I created the character of Willie.
I said to Ken, you know, I said,
"Give me some help here. What... how do you see him?"
You know? And I remember Ken saying two words:
"Gene Wilder."
And that just was so out of the left field for me,
but I love Gene Wilder.
Robert absolutely captured that desire to please and...
and to be involved from the very first time we see him,
in the scene with Jason Bernard
where they run into each other,
and Jason is this big, gruff son of a gun
who just doesn't like these aliens taking their jobs.
And he bumps into Robert and says,
"What the hell are you doing?"
And Robert just takes his glasses off...
oh, first the dark glasses so that we could see his eyes...
and he says, "I-I need help."
Help what?
I am just...
Just what?
Yes.
Oh, get out of the way. Damn stupid alien.
And he absolutely got the moment
that I was looking for.
He was somebody who was not menacing or dark or evil
and didn't really believe in the leaders' plans
but rather was more connected to humanity.
He was the first alien
that really kind of took humanity's side, I felt like.
You know, he fell in love, um, but he was so innocent.
I think it was his innocence in V that really,
kind of made me fall in love with the character
and I think made everybody fall in love with the character.
And, you know, you kind of counteract him with...
Diana Jane Badler's like the super evil one.
He was just this nice mixture of like, you know,
humor and innocence and sweetness.
Just... just what everybody wants to find in a guy
that doesn't exist in real people.
Hello, Harmony.
Robert has a great ease and facility
that was really fun to be around.
And we hit it off right away because we're both talkers.
You want a burger?
No.
Don't you guys ever eat?
Sometimes.
I love the juxtaposition of the way
Kenny Johnson wrote the two characters
because I played sort of the salt of the earth.
I, with the catering truck, you know,
innocent, very grounded, and he was this confused alien
who was on the side of good and didn't speak English.
So it was two great, very different, you know,
characters, Mutt and Jeff, you know, Abbott and Costello,
which is a perfect combination for a great, great relationship.
I think they look real snappy in those uniforms.
Robert and I worked together
before either one of us were known for our characters.
And I did a couple episodes
as one of his lizard men or something.
I was in a makeup but, you know, technically,
one of his bad guys.
V was the number one mini-series in America,
with ratings as good as Roots.
It was my first sort of big introduction to,
wow, television really reaches a lot of people.
And V did two things for me.
It made me international overnight
and people knew my name overnight.
He began to get recognized.
And that's a moment when an actor transitions
from being just a working actor to being a recognizable star.
You know, I was flying over for awards
and film festivals and publicity.
So it was... it was just a great experience for me.
I had a window within my schedule
and the only project that really fit
was this thing called A Nightmare on Elm Street.
An awkward, strange title.
I knew a little bit about Wes Craven.
I had him filed under,
like David Lynch, "artist, dark, strange."
So when I went on the interview,
I was sort of expecting Rasputin or some goth guy.
Of course, Wes is sitting there dressed in Ralph Lauren,
pinwale corduroys, brilliant, erudite, smart,
puns a lot, likes... likes corny jokes.
What's interesting about Freddy Krueger is
that when Wes was first looking for this character,
he was auditioning stuntmen.
He wasn't even looking for an actor.
Interesting fact, I had,
way back before Robert was hired,
had a meeting with Wes Craven because I had done
The Hills Have Eyes II.
Wes knew that I had burn scars,
and he said he was developing a new character
that is going to be a horror character who's been burned.
And he goes, "I'm thinking of using someone
with real burns scars."
When Kane tells that story now and you just start to wonder,
what if it had gone that way?
But everything always works out like it should.
I was in the middle of spring surfing.
I was tan, I had long curly blonde hair,
and I thought, "You know, I don't feel like
I look anything like what they're going to want.
I'm not big enough. I'm not scary enough."
There's nothing threatening about Robert,
at least in his demeanor when you're meeting him.
So I went, and I took the dipstick
from under the hood of my car and I got some oil on my hands.
And I greased my hair back straight to my scalp.
Realized my buddy had left a cigarette butt
in my ashtray in my car.
So I took a little saliva,
and I mixed it with the cigarette ash
and I put circles under my eyes.
They looked very natural, just kind of discolored,
like I am permanently now.
Now my face looked long and lean.
I got in there and I just let Wes do all the talking.
I kept my mouth shut.
And I played... a staring game with Wes.
And as long as he talked, I tried not to blink.
And it worked.
This... is God.
You really look for actors
that you think can break through
all the veneer of civilization
in one way or the other, either as victim or as,
you know, perpetrator.
There's that sort of Kosovo factor of people
that at one moment can be nurturing their children,
the next moment slashing each other's throats.
And so, you look for that willingness
on the part of an actor to expose that
and to be cruel or to be inventive in the cruelty.
Quite often, it's the person that's the most gentle
or the most civilized.
Now I'm going to be truthful and honest
as I can here.
People are so kind and nice, and they say that Wes thought
I was the only person that understood
when he pitched the idea to me,
but it could have been as simple as
me having a thin face and Wes being paranoid about
the makeup effects and how they would work.
Just knowing that my skinny thin face
when you put the foam latex on it
would still be natural in size,
in ratio with my broad shoulders.
The day that I saw him really in his makeup was...
it was part of that high school scene
where I go into the basement
and I see Freddy Krueger for the first time
and I think it was the first time I saw him in makeup.
And maybe Wes had planned it that way.
I mean, if he had, it was really genius
because I turned around and I see him in his makeup
and it's dark and it's really scary.
Eugh! Creepy.
So I remember thinking,
"Wow, that's what Freddy's gonna look like."
It was what I'd pictured,
but it was shocking to see it in person.
I mean, it worked well for my character,
death being the first person
to fight Freddy.
Aaahh!
You can't have Freddy Krueger without Robert Englund.
It's Robert who makes that character.
You can see the way Nick Castle moves
when he's playing Michael Myers.
You can see the way Kane Hodder moves.
When he's Jason he's got, like, very specific body language.
But Freddy's the one that, under all that makeup,
Robert really has to act.
Watch this.
Robert said, "Well, you know,
I've just done this movie.
I'm covered in makeup. I don't have many lines.
I don't know.
Maybe I should get into real estate.
What should I do?"
My feeling is the monster characters,
they don't become iconic because of the writers.
They don't become iconic
necessarily because of the directors.
They don't even become iconic
necessarily because of the makeup,
although it certainly helps.
You can have all those factors.
If the guy behind the makeup isn't selling it right,
isn't convincing, isn't himself convinced,
then it doesn't work.
Like most actors, you don't, you don't realize
that this is going to be a life-changing moment.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, the first one,
was really a big breakthrough for everybody.
I first saw Nightmare on Elm Street
and I don't know if I had ever been that scared in a movie.
It just really struck a nerve
with audiences all over the world.
I was frightened.
I mean, I was stunned
because it was the first time in a long time
where the process of the filmmaking disappeared,
and I just was blown away.
It was different in so many ways
because the concept of it was just so like
outrageously beyond every other slasher movie.
It's a very strange movie.
Such an offbeat movie.
I remember really being blown away
by how popular
a horror film could feel.
People were shrieking, laughing, enjoying themselves.
I remember going to my girlfriend's house
at the time to watch Nightmare on Elm Street,
and I'm unabashedly not afraid to say
that I was nervous. And to watch that
and try to keep my cool
in front of my girlfriend was challenging enough.
It was just so imaginative,
such strong characters,
and I'd never seen like a villain like Freddy.
He was the first real slasher film icon
that had style.
The movie influenced me so much
that I wrote a prequel and sent it to Bob Shea
when I was 14.
I ended up interning at New Line when I was 19.
I worked there for 11 years
and that's where I made Final Destination,
so I... I literally credit Nightmare on Elm Street
as starting my career in the business.
I went to see Nightmare on Elm Street
with a girl, and I was just blown away
by the imaginative characteristics of the film
and his character.
Six months later,
I get a call from my friend Bart Mixon,
who was working with Mark Sjostrom,
who invited me to come work on Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
I was going to work with,
you know, the big new horror star Robert Englund.
He brought so much into Freddy the way he built Freddy.
And then you see the footage that they tried to use
in Nightmare on Elm Street 2 with the doppelganger,
and it's night and fucking day.
I remember being at a meeting
at the production office,
and they were actually kicking around
whether it was worth bringing Englund back to be Freddy.
I guess the norm at that time was using stuntmen
for, you know, Jason or Mike Myers or whatever.
I mean, there's just like this asshole
in a cosplayer outfit, you know, kind of walking out of the steam
and you're like, "That's so not Robert Englund.
What the fuck is going on?"
"Why hire an actor and then bury him in makeup?"
It's like, "That's why you hire an actor."
Thankfully, I think the main producers recognized
what he brought to the first film
and I'm sure there would have never been a part three,
you know, had that happened.
And he brings that character back to life.
That's special, man.
And that's... it's the gift of a true actor.
We got special work to do here, you and me.
My actual first meeting with Robert Englund
was on set after working for about three months.
He had just finished having his makeup done,
and I turn over
to see him tapping his finger on a mirror.
Oh, Mister Knify hands.
Mister Knify hands is here, oy vey.
He came up full Chevy Chase style and said,
I like it.
As Freddy.
There might have been drugs involved.
What a rush.
When I got to work with Robert on Nightmare Three...
You.
Oh, my God.
He was the elder, but I was like the mid-elder,
and then we had the younger kids,
and we both took a much more protective attitude
about the kids.
He's often in a fantastic image of himself:
puppeteer in the sky,
or he's a giant snake coming out of a floor
swallowing Patricia Arquette.
The effects on part three are fucking amazing.
And so, having him on the set as himself,
there weren't that many days of that.
He's larger than life in a way.
He is a character in that dream.
He's not the actual, real, pathetic,
strange little man that was Freddy Krueger.
I asked Robert, I said,
"Are you a child murderer or a child molester?
There's a big difference here."
I mean, the guy was a fucking child molester.
There really isn't much sympathy for Freddy Krueger.
I mean, kids love Freddy Krueger.
There's something about him that everyone has sort of
dismissed the child molester part and thought,
"Oh, this is a guy who kills you in your dreams."
He became the boogeyman.
And the fact that Robert still managed to
make him not just horrific, but likable,
where you wanted to see more of him
and you're not just hating him and waiting for him to die
or go away, that's everything.
And that's why Freddy will last.
And New Line quickly moved away from
anything molesting, which is wise.
So he just murders them, which is bad enough.
I did notice that there were little kids
coming to my door dressed as Freddy
and that's when I really realized
that it had hit this pop culture place.
When I was in his dressing room with him
and we were talking, there was a huge crowd
and they started rocking the trailer.
And he was so great with them.
He went out there and he was dressed in his...
in his stuff, you know, in his outfit,
and he went out there and he was like,
"You guys gotta quit knocking the thing
or you're gonna knock me over.
But I appreciate you all out here."
You know, it was really nice and it was scary.
I mean, we thought we were gonna be tipped over.
Freddy Krueger right here. Nightmare on Elm Street.
Yeah?
This is my Freddy Krueger mask.
I made it myself, the sculpting on up.
This is my claw.
He doesn't become a rock star of horror
because he's a child murderer, molester.
It's because Robert Englund has so much humor
and so much personality and so much joie de morte,
instead of vivre.
You can't have any film or any style of film
without having a charismatic person at the helm.
I love... just loved the way that Robert was able to juggle
humor with horror.
The humor was very rare in the first one,
but it was there.
And it became embellished in the sequels afterwards,
in some people's opinion.
Freddy does speak. Says "bitch" a lot.
Bon appétit, bitch.
But it's Robert playing this scarred character
who has this wicked, nasty sense of humor.
And it really appeals to a young audience
because they don't think about mortality,
and they enjoy the rending of these bodies on screen
by the bladed glove of Freddy Krueger.
I don't believe in fairy tales.
At that point, I had a little boy who had nightmares,
and kids that have nightmares
always want the thing that scares them;
that's what they seek.
So he was always wanting all this Freddy Krueger stuff.
So it was such a trip.
He wouldn't understand "I work with that guy."
In fact, it would probably have freaked him out.
For the same reason you'll embrace black metal
in the hopes that your parents would hate it,
you'll embrace outrageous violence in films.
And so Robert is a de facto uncle to this audience.
I mean, I've always said
that horror films are to film what rock is to music.
By the time Nightmare 3 came out and Robert was a guest VJ on MTV
and you had the Dokken song,
interestingly enough,
that was the first time I met him.
When that came... came on MTV, I was like...
whooh!
♪ We're the dream warriors ♪
I lost my mind.
This was like a real deal, serious, serious video.
I've always said that
Freddy is rock and roll, and Pinhead is a requiem mass.
We made a lot of fun of him and what he had become
and what Freddy had become,
and why the pop culture around Freddy was just so,
you know, it was just really amusing and... and crazy.
Gah!
And he's Robert fucking Englund,
for God's sake.
Guys, Freddy Krueger,
the star of Nightmare on Elm Street,
portrayed by this very fine actor...
not a school teacher, Debbie... Mr. Robert Englund.
Please welcome the man who plays Freddy Krueger,
Robert Englund.
- Robert Englund. - Robert Englund here.
Do you like your movies?
Yeah, I do. I... I... I think there's a,
I think there's a need for these movies.
I hate to say this, Freddy,
but I can't go and see your movies.
I am too afraid.
Well...
It's a complete accident.
It's a happy accident.
The double whammy of me being an international
television science fiction character that everybody loved,
that's very, very different
from the dark boogeyman of these incredibly imaginative
and original horror films that I did
that became a franchise.
There was just so many things you could buy.
Record albums, and sweaters of course, and hats.
There's just so much that they ended up marketing
that as much as it's nice to see Freddy be a rock star,
I thought that it kind of... there was something cheap...
that cheapened the whole thing by it.
The reason that I...
a benefactor from this gift that just keeps giving
is because simultaneously another happy accident occurred.
First, there was early cable, and I was on cable,
parts one, two, three;
early video, the mom-and-pop video stores.
People would stay home now on weekends, save money.
They'd let the kids pick a movie.
Well, of course, the kids would pick
Nightmare on Elm Street 1 or Nightmare on Elm Street 2
or three or four,
and they'd bring it home on a Saturday,
Mom and Dad sit around and they'd let them watch
Mom and Dad get scared, have a pizza.
And then there was Freddy's Nightmares.
I mean, like Freddy had his own television show.
Freddy killed children, and he had a television show,
which everybody loved.
I was lured into the television series
by a number of factors.
Not the least of which was money, I'll be honest.
I was lured in specifically because
they were gonna give me my DGA card,
my Directors Guild of America card.
I directed several episodes.
I did not have to give Robert much direction.
He knew Freddy better than I did.
If the suspense doesn't get you, I will.
I was in like a motel room with my family and...
and we were clicking through the channels,
and it was like an ad for call Freddy at one point
where it was like a like "1-800, call Freddy
and he'll talk to you on the phone."
Join the Freddy Fan Club.
Freddy Krueger has a special message just for you.
It was like phone sex,
but it was with Freddy instead, you know.
Robert was willing to make fun of himself a great deal
and I think he knew how...
how absurd and crazy it was that Freddy Krueger has now been
this worldwide phenomenon.
But he loves it.
I never set out to be an actor to sign autographs or...
or drive a Mercedes,
but I must confess that I do like the attention.
My mother died early on in the Freddy phenomenon.
She'd see me on chat shows, on talk shows.
Or she'd be watching the late-night talk shows
and Johnny Carson,
or someone would do a Freddy Krueger joke.
You see Mayor Bradley's in a little bit of trouble?
He declared today Freddy Krueger Day.
It had begun to enter the vernacular then,
and so she was receptive to that.
But then she passed and didn't really see
the sort of peak of the phenomenon,
but my father got to experience a lot of that.
And the only time my father ever visited me,
I could have been, you know, not wearing makeup,
I could have been at any one of dozens of other projects,
but he came the day that I was crucified
with Makita screws on three-quarter-inch plywood.
That was the first project I worked with Robert on,
Nightmare 4.
This is the biggest sequence,
it's the finale, it's the end.
Roll it.
Souls burst out of him and get their vengeance on Robert.
And I had this animatronic chest and torso on.
Adjacent to me
was a giant, King Kong size chest of souls.
They were doing a ratio thing with the camera.
So I had these phenomenally sculptured special effects
makeup heads of my victims, the souls of my victims,
moving around and talking and...
and their little mouths and their lips would move,
and their nostrils would flare,
and I could feel the little clockwork mechanisms
behind them, you know, tearing at my flesh.
I was up there for probably eight hours.
We tortured the poor guy.
We're shooting all day. He can't move.
He's literally glued into that wall
in this big animatronic body
that's sticking out of his chest.
Total trouper.
And that's the day my father came to see his son,
recruited by Stanford, crucified in makeup
with men that had like, there were like wires
going up every orifice on my body.
You know, "Oh, hi, Dad.
How are ya?"
It wasn't embarrassing as much as it was surreal and funny.
But looking back on it, it was a rather strange way
to have your father see you working as an artist.
But you know, behind the scenes,
it's a different story.
I think I ended up partying with Robert
more than I ended up working with him.
I very well could have partied with those guys.
I just don't remember.
I like it!
I was in the makeup trailer,
and I was watching him get his makeup on,
which was elaborate.
And we would talk about things like, you know,
acting and Shakespeare, and I was thinking,
"God, I have to be afraid of him.
He's so... he's so sweet."
But then when I saw him in the scene,
when I had scenes with him,
he becomes this swaggering, sexy almost, villain.
I mean, he's got this sexiness about him, I think.
That menace has a certain sexual threat to it.
And his victims are women, and I mean, they're...
that's all built into the character.
He had a predator posture, and he comes to your bedroom.
He's in your subconscious,
so he knows what's in your diary.
He knows what you want. He knows your fantasies.
That's what's sexy about it.
And it's funny because as I said,
I answer all the email on robertenglund.com.
"I love you so much." And it's like, yay.
I know he's going home with me
so I really don't have to be jealous about that
fabulous Freddiette there
with her skirt that stops there
and shirt that stops there.
Doing a horror film
was like one step above like crappy porn.
You know, they're like,
"Oh, you got a horror film, big deal."
But anyhow, we didn't know it was gonna explode.
But Robert Englund had become a star
and I knew who he was too.
And then we're wrapping up the film and he...
I say, I go, "Hey, can I get an autograph from you,
like people do now?"
He says, "Danny, hopefully we'll get to work together again."
And then like, three weeks later,
we ended up getting Nightmare 5, it became a real thing.
So I've been a fan of Robert for a long time.
I knew of Nightmare on Elm Street
but I had never seen one, but it's kind of like,
"I didn't know this shit was this serious."
This is a cultural phenomenon.
People love Freddy Krueger.
And I feel very blessed and fortunate
that I even had the opportunity to work with Robert.
I mean, he's super nice.
I don't consider that I've done six horror movies.
I consider I've done one roll.
It's a chance, every once in a while,
to get it just the way I want it.
And it's kind of fun because of Freddy,
I can do a little bit of that.
I changed the voice. I changed the way I moved.
You can't replace him.
You can't put somebody else in that makeup.
It has to be Robert,
and I don't think anyone will accept anybody else.
In 50 years, I hope there will be other actors
playing and doing a fabulous job at Freddy Krueger.
My only problem with Freddy now
is that I'm turning down other projects
that I'd like to do.
When the Freddy project comes alive last year,
I had to turn down a great movie in Australia.
It's the actor's nightmare, you know,
that you can't like divide yourself
and split like an amoeba.
That's very frustrating.
I mean, gosh, you know, I've waited all these years to...
to have this problem.
All of a sudden, you get a role that defines you,
and sometimes people don't allow you
to escape the confines of that character.
Here was a guy that as a character actor
could have, I think, done anything
because his skill set is there.
However, having done Freddy,
it launched him into a kind of American subconscious,
and now a worldwide subconscious where he's iconic.
And yet it was oddly limiting for him.
Robert became so associated with Freddy
that Freddy gets the credit for his performance.
There's so much more to Robert than Freddy Krueger,
and I think if there's any, I'm gonna say downside,
is that it's deprived us of seeing him
branch out into parts that might have actually
also really thrilled us.
I can play a lawyer tomorrow if somebody asked me,
and I'd be very happy to.
Does KISS get sick
of playing rock and roll all night, every night?
Probably.
But that's what everyone's there to see.
So in a case like Robert Englund,
where you get to play a character like Freddy,
you've just completely knocked it out of the park
and everybody knows you as that and loves you as that,
that's pretty amazing.
He is a really talented actor.
And I think assumptions get made about horror actors
that they're less than, and it's unfair.
One of the problems with being, you know,
an icon, if you will, or having an iconic part
is that you end up holding on to it
like it's a life raft, you know, like, you,
"Boy, without this, I am nothing."
I don't think you get trapped in that role like you used to.
I think that it's a bit of a...
like a bit of a gift and a curse.
It's not a curse, it's a blessing.
And I think Robert appreciates that.
He has learned to appreciate that
as much as I have.
At some point... I know I've found this...
is that I kind of just have been really happy
with the idea that this will be the one part
that people know me for, and I have to be okay with that.
And I think Robert probably is too.
And I think he's been able to handle it quite well.
I thought a little bit about fighting it.
And there came a point when I absolutely surrendered to it.
Partly on the advice of Wes Craven, but also,
with myself as an actor, I embraced it.
Turn your head slightly. Vacuum off.
Keep turning the head now.
Robert is such a pro.
And it's not just that he's a pro about his own performance.
He's one of those film actors who understands film.
Robert has probably seen more movies
than all of us combined.
Oh, one of my favorite films,
a 1974 Brian DePalma film, Sisters.
After the day's work,
he would get out of his whole outfit
and we'd all have a couple of beers
and go to a small screening room,
and he'd draw something to my attention
that maybe I wasn't aware of,
and I could draw something to his attention
that he wasn't thinking about.
No matter where you are or what you're talking about...
he is just a 100-mile-an-hour ball of ideas.
Well, Robert pays attention.
It's not all about Robert. It's not all about Freddy.
It's not all about that character,
but he really understands the machinery of filmmaking,
as well as the creative depth of the actor.
It goes beyond the actor.
Knows where the camera is, knows how close the shot is,
knows how to pitch his performance accordingly.
So he's hyper-aware of what lens is on the camera,
what's the... not just what the angle of view,
but what's the lens so that if he takes two steps back
on a move, is that going to be really impactful
or is it not going to be so impactful?
Because the lens selection is going to change that. Right?
And so there's a very like interactive way
that Robert works with the people around him.
People have often talked about
how he angles Freddy's glove.
It's not a surprise that, you know,
he's a director himself, 976-EVIL.
I thought I told you not to tell anybody
about last night.
Mommy said we were blessed by the Lord.
I directed my first professional play,
I think in 1966.
For me, directing film is not as pleasant an experience
as I thought,
and I'm much more at home directing in the theater.
The only offers I ever get are genre.
It takes a year off of your life because there's pre-production,
and then there's the shoot.
Tick-tock tick-tock, the nervous stomach.
Time is money. Not...
you can't really luxuriate in the creative process
like you imagine you can in theater.
But I had some wonderful actors.
I got to work and direct the late great Sandy Dennis,
who literally invented the neurotic female on film.
I've enjoyed working with him very, very much.
First of all, because he enjoys me, I think.
I can justify that experience just for that.
On the set of 976-EVIL,
I was actually nervous about working on this movie,
because I'd heard that the director was an actor,
and he was a first-time director,
and those can be a pain in the ass,
especially in the art department.
I was a set decorator.
So if they don't know anything, they'll go in,
"Oh, that's not how it was in my grandma's house.
You have to have this kind of rug."
It's like, "Go play with the cameras."
I hadn't seen any of the Nightmare movies.
There was a Rolling Stone magazine with his picture
and I was like, "Okay. Oh, yeah, that's him. Okay."
Nancy drew the short straw, and got the grunt job
of having to drive the location manager and myself,
looking for locations in Hollywood.
I had already picked a couple of locations.
I would make Nancy drive anyway to those locations.
And she got to drive on the freeways for hours
and I was slowly falling in love.
And this is so creepy now when I think back on it,
but I also, I found out where she lived.
Hm... Okay.
And a couple of nights,
I drove... getting my courage up
to knock on the door and ask her out.
I'd wait and like sit, watch her light go on upstairs,
like a Hitchcock movie or something.
Okay, fine.
I remember taking her to a famous bar
across the street from the Formosa.
And I kissed her, and my knees almost buckled.
I was like a little kid.
Because I'd been around.
I'd been divorced.
I'd come out of a ten-year relationship
that wasn't working.
I had a lot of, you know, scars.
And I was probably 38 years old.
I remember saying to her, and I stole this line
from an old James Garner-Sally Field movie,
"I think I'm in love for the last time in my life."
You know, I'm gonna be running on empty.
And she said, "Well, you know, clear out your baggage,
and call me." And I did.
I was on the show when Robert and Nancy met.
And I can tell you that by the end of the show,
you could hear their heartbeats
and you could see the twinkles in their eyes.
They were so in love.
I saw that this could be serious;
that he was a serious man
and he had serious intentions for me and...
and therefore we wanted to be logical about it.
Who is this lovely woman next to you?
This is my fiancée, Nancy Booth.
We did, and it worked.
Nancy, you have strange taste in men.
Is he... is he... off screen, is he regular, normal,
all of that?
Sweet, intelligent, wonderful. Yes.
I don't actually think I've seen Robert without Nancy
as long as I can remember.
They were like two little sweet peas in a pod.
She strikes me as someone
who can just keep the train running on the tracks,
and they just bring out the very best in each other.
I think that they're a pretty humble couple
but they just happen to live this really rock-star lifestyle.
Also contributes to why we don't have children now,
because, you know, I wanted to be with him,
be traveling the world, so.
He worships the ground she walks on.
It's a really beautiful thing to see.
And I just think they're a really good team together.
And here we are, 30 years later, so...
I have all kinds of memories
about Phantom of the Opera.
That was part of a two-picture deal for me
with a big international company,
Canon Jones 21st century, and it's a family business.
Menahem Golan realized that the Phantom of the Opera title,
the literary title,
had come into public domain, so he thought,
"I need to immediately make a Phantom of the Opera ."
It was all over Broadway,
the Lloyd Webber version was still very active.
And they went to Robert right away
because he had become the horror kind of icon.
I think it was my biggest payday;
considerably more than I was earning
for the Nightmare films.
I knew that as a marketing tool,
Robert Englund was of value.
But we were really going to make a movie
about Eric Destler and kind of left Freddy behind.
My makeup was much more intricate
and much longer in application than Freddy Krueger.
There was also the... the form Phantom makeup,
so I had on two makeups at all the time.
And then later on that day,
you might need to see a bit of it peeling away,
because the Phantom's preoccupation was,
he would kill to take the skin off his victims
and cover his deformity so he could go out in public,
to the opera, attend his beloved opera
and listen to the music
and hear his beloved Christine sing...
♪ Your eyes see but my shadow ♪
I didn't meet Robert until we were actually in
Budapest where we shot the film, and we had no rehearsal.
You just get up there, and you do it.
Jill looks like what you imagine Christine to
look like and Jill can sing.
And she's a wonderful actress.
Here come the tears.
Not only did she have to star in this film,
not only was it period,
but she had to sing and lip sync...
she had as much work as I had on that film,
if not more.
There's one oddball scene where he's completely alone.
I just had the camera on Robert.
And he shows up and he watches Christine
perform in Faust, and he's watching her on stage.
But he didn't have anything really to react to,
except an eyeline and the music.
But what he did as an actor in that moment,
I... I really understood, you know, the longing,
the... the lusting, the... just everything was in this.
There's no dialogue, just Robert acting.
So for a director, that's a big moment,
where you think, "Oh my God, this guy really,
this guy really can deliver."
Robert Englund is...
You're him, aren't you?
...the Phantom of the Opera.
When they marketed it,
they went for the lowest common denominator.
They made one poster, and they doctored it
so it looked a little bit like Freddy.
The marketing people didn't leave him behind,
but we did.
The German posters and the British posters
are a great handsome photo of me as the Phantom and Jill.
They say, "Robert Englund, you loved him as Freddy,
you'll love him as the Phantom."
I don't mind that. That's fine.
That comes with the territory.
I'm a Hollywood kid, I know that.
I just didn't like that doctored to look like Freddy.
That was one problem.
The second problem was that we...
we completely split our two audiences,
because the Lloyd Webber Phantom people
were not expecting the horror gore elements.
It didn't surprise me that it had problems
from that point of view.
You lost the audience when it got into the slice, dice.
Dwight and I always were going for a genre with the film.
Dwight and I remembered being teenagers,
and taking our girls to the drive-in movies,
and seeing all the Hammer Films: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing,
Herbert Long.
We loved those films.
So we used the saturated color, and we changed our Phantom
from the Paris Opera to the English Opera
so that we could be in the same time frame,
but in the London of Jack the Ripper,
to give it that edge.
It was a strange combination, to be honest.
A very strange combination.
I'm Robert Englund, and you're watching USA,
America's favorite cable network.
After Phantom of the Opera,
the door had opened for me to work abroad.
Audio Jungle.
I did movies in Russia.
The experience of shooting that movie was life-changing.
Whether he plays in drag,
really well, that remains to be seen.
I did movies in Italy and the UK and Mexico,
Israel and Bulgaria
and Romania, South Africa.
That's a hell of a flight.
My passport was now a passport
of an international man of mystery.
Amongst those films I did in Europe,
one we did in Spain, down in Amarillo where they shot
all the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns.
I worked on a film called
La lengua asesina, The Killer Tongue.
I met some bloke from the UK,
who'd had a bit of success in horror movies too.
What's his name?
You know, the guy with the nails in his face.
I can't remember the name.
Oh, yeah, Pinhead.
We'll tear your soul apart.
There was a movie I was supposed to do
with Arnold Schwarzenegger,
and they never got the financing complete...
with Paul Verhoeven, who I love and respect,
and Arnold, who I knew.
He was going to do a Crusades movie where he was
Arnold Schwarzenegger's valet.
And it began at six months in northern Spain.
That's how the project began, with more money
than I'd ever been offered before in my life.
There were a lot of delightful things
that would have happened on this movie.
I, as a younger actor,
losing those roles or those movies being...
being canceled would cost me weeks of sleep and tension.
But you can't entertain that any longer.
You learn there's a point where you just have to let it go.
Nancy is always telling me, "Robert, let it go."
I deal with it.
So there was a point, you know, at some point in my 40s,
where I did, I just let it go
and made peace with the fact that somewhere in my obituary,
probably the first sentence, Freddy, you know,
will rear his ugly little head.
I'm sure people ask you this all the time.
Is Freddy really dead?
Of course he is. Freddy's dead and gone.
Ha ha! Love you, babe.
Wes called me up and said he had thought of an idea
to bring everyone back together,
and it brought Nancy and Freddy back.
And he wanted me to read it.
It was just so preposterous.
I mean, the whole idea of playing myself,
I just... I had to look at my husband and just say,
"I don't know. If you say no, I won't do it."
Have you seen any of the script, by any chance?
Well, Wes won't show it until he's finished.
I was attracted to the sort of meta-deconstructed element of it
and... and the fact that Wes was making it for the fans.
You know, I talked to Robert
and, you know, he was very excited about it.
And I talked to Wes, and he was really excited about it.
And I decided yes, and I immediately was
really excited about starting that project.
And Robert and I just had a wonderful time doing it.
Miss me?
The Freddy character was so iconic at the time
that you didn't have to necessarily see the movies
to know who he was.
He was almost like a superhero.
I remember Wes saying,
"This is sort of an uber-Freddy.
This is an angry Freddy
because he was based on some essence of truth, his evil,
and now he's been exploited by Hollywood and Robert Englund
and Wes Craven and New Line Cinema,
and he's gonna get us."
I think both Wes and I were
just extremely jealous of Robert.
You know, here's Wes Craven even.
He's writing that because even he felt that
what Robert was going through
was just kind of absurd and ridiculous considering,
you know, it was Wes Craven's creation.
I made a conscious decision then.
I saw how big Freddy was.
There's this exponential growth of fans.
And you can't control that. And it's really difficult.
You either start it very early in your career, and I didn't,
to control it with a manager
that really sees a specific thing
that you're going to be an action star,
or you are going to be A-list always
and you can't say yes to anything else.
Or you kind of surrender with what's happened
in terms of popularity, and what people want from you.
I didn't fight it.
I never thought I would become a genre star in horror.
And so I just went with the flow.
I never had seen the movies.
But when I got the call that I was going to audition
to be in one, I was elated because...
because I immediately knew, and it was pretty exciting.
Ever play...
skin the cat?
Greg!
I was exposed to the makeup process
with Freddy early on, so I saw Robert beforehand
and the transformation.
He was always very personable in and out of character.
He was a joy to be around.
Of the seven,
I would say the New Nightmare is probably the best
because it reinvents it.
And Robert is, of course, very affecting
because you get to see him what he's like as a person
as opposed to the Freddy Krueger character.
He's...
Darker... more evil?
When New Nightmare came out,
it was successful, but it wasn't a mega-hit.
I think people didn't know what to make of it.
The title even maybe was a little strange.
It's a... it's a Freddy movie,
but it's not a Freddy movie. It's got Wes's name in it.
What is this? And it was kind of his playground
to explore the themes that I think he really expanded on
in Scream, in his next movie.
And Scream,
was just that much more accessible to the fans.
But after Scream came out,
people rediscovered Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
It happens a lot of times with...
with some movies where with enough distance,
they... they kind of come into their own.
I was a little surprised
that Wes Craven's New Nightmare
didn't come out of the gate as a huge box-office success.
We'd worked really hard on it.
But you know, the... the '90s, things were changing.
And some of the old war horses of horror
were diminishing in... in their fame and their success.
And the audiences were looking at different
kinds of movies then.
I sort of ran out of gas a little bit.
At one point in the '90s, you know,
we decided that people were already forgetting the stuff
that I'd done in the '70s.
So we did some Disney films,
Meet the Deedles and The Paper Brigade.
And to this day, I've probably signed more autographs
for that little family film
than any other project except for Nightmare on Elm Street.
Life's a bitch, then you die.
Get him back to work.
I think Mangler and Phantom were my double bill.
There was supposed to be a second Phantom film
and The Mangler. It was a package thing.
It was very lucrative. And I mean, I think now
I would have been foolish to turn down a Stephen King movie.
Three modern masters of horror
have just created the ultimate machine...
...for terror.
The Mangler.
I said, well, you know, Toby's back
and I like the source material and I need a hook,
and I remembered that old Orson Welles movie,
Lady from Shanghai, and the guy with the leg braces,
the cuckolded husband.
He decided to stop and give her one.
He'll cast a book. When he's reading, he's like,
"Oh, who'd you use for that young guy?
I used Nick Nolte." And I was like,
"You cast...?" I was like...
When I read the short story,
I imagined him and I translated that into the...
and communicated to my makeup man,
"That's the look I want to go for: Bill Gartley."
Goddamn sons of bitches.
Robert Englund is a better actor
than any of the roles that he's played
after Freddy Krueger.
He brings everything to the table,
and the only times he is let down
is if the script is not as good as it should be.
Because Robert is capable of elevating material.
Why don't you shut that thing down
before somebody else gets hurt.
Not if I were you.
He's having so much fun,
and he's so evil and he's so great and so delicious.
And in every scene, it's the...
it's scenery-chewing in the best way.
It's like he will look at a scene
and understand really how to make the most out of it.
Frawley, you stupid old bitch.
The Mangler originally was supposed to be shot in Toronto,
but instead we went to Johannesburg
and shot at a studio there.
On our sound stage, I think they'd found a body.
That was a little scary.
And also, seeing the remnants of apartheid everywhere
was a bit frightening.
Barbed wire on the top of fences
and lots of German Shepherd dogs.
I don't think they're pets.
But it was getting better. It was getting hopeful.
But I had a great time making that movie.
There are horror icons.
There's Freddy.
There's Jason.
There's Pinhead.
There's Chucky.
But then there are iconic horror actors.
Robert Englund, Tony Todd, and Kane Hodder.
One of the fun things about Wishmaster
was that certainly, I and I think the whole crew
regard it as a kind of valediction to the period
immediately before the movie was made,
which was the '80s era of monster character.
And so, I put a lot of references into the script...
names, winks to the audience.
And what was great is that Bob,
Robert Kurtzman the director, because he was the K in K.N.B.,
he had these connections with so many iconic figures
from those '80s movies.
I've waited ten years for this piece.
I did Wishmaster because I loved the hook.
I loved the gimmick.
You be careful what you wish for.
I was excited, and I was excited that
he was going to be playing, you know, just a victim.
I'm washing the shit out of this.
The character Robert was playing, Beaumont,
the somewhat corrupt art collector,
it was so in Robert's wheelhouse that it was like
he could have done it without dialogue.
What do you mean, it went down in history?
Yes.
Robert and I came from very different backgrounds.
Mine was all physical,
which fit with the Jason character
because there's no dialogue. It's all physical stuff.
But Robert had the perfect background
with all his acting training.
And once I started doing characters with dialogue,
I found it pretty challenging
because I had no training in acting ever.
I can't say I give a shit either.
We had a lot of horror character actors
that were playing all sorts of smaller roles.
It was sort of stocked full of everybody
from the horror genre.
After I heard they were in, Robert included,
I'd give the characters a little tweak, thinking,
"Well, you know, A, they probably need more lines
than I gave them.
And B, maybe I should try and make the lines better."
This is not going in the fucking film.
That was the first time that they got the trio
for myself, Kane Hodder, and Robert.
We didn't work together,
but we have this historic three-shot that floats around
and reappears on tables and cards everywhere.
Andrew had the burden of the makeup in that film,
as the genie, The Djinn.
I'm trying to do Andrew, but I can't.
His voice is so great.
Make your wish.
It was really a workout getting that thing workin', man.
I went in and auditioned
and was quite lucky to be able to sit with Robert
before the audition, and he,
as a big brother, was so insightful about,
and... and one of the things he said is that,
"Make sure you put it in your contract, kid,
that when you're done, they gotta go clean your face."
He says, "There's going to be glue in there for weeks
that you're not going to get out."
And I'm thinking "Wow."
And I do know for a fact
Robert has the record of consecutive days
wearing the makeup.
But I think it's because of Robert's experience
that other sort of directors and producers
sort of heard about, "Well, you know, you can't,
it'll start pulling the skin off and it'll...
it'll start changing the complexion."
And so he was a guinea pig really for that.
And so people, people paid attention.
Thank you, sir.
Pleasure doing business with you.
Horror movies, for me, were kind of the product
of diminishing returns in the '90s,
I think the makeup roles especially.
But I did begin doing horror movies out of makeup.
I was not a big fan of horror films.
And so, when I came to Urban Legend,
I took it because it was,
uh... Jamie Blanks's approach to Urban Legend
was not going to be a slasher film.
He said privately,
"We're not going to show what's in the script."
So there was a lot of blood... bloody stuff in the script.
"And we're gonna be really playing
with the thriller aspects."
I said, "Who's playing the professor?"
And he said, "Robert Englund."
And I... it didn't quite register who Englund is.
He's like, "You know, Freddy Krueger."
"Really?"
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter what he's in.
Your first thing is always, "Oh, it's Freddy,"
or "It's the guy who played Freddy."
No, it's Robert Englund. It's Freddy.
So I was a little skeptical, frankly,
because I wasn't really a fan of those films.
Who gives a fuck what you think?
I met him as Professor Wexler
on set at the University of Toronto,
and I was completely taken with Robert.
He was a complete surprise.
The babysitter and the man upstairs
is what we call an urban legend.
That's a really well-directed movie.
That movie is slick as snot, as we used to say.
It's held up because the psychology of the characters
are so rich, all of them are so interesting,
all are suspect at some point.
And there was an extraordinary cast.
Jared Leto, who has Oscars now.
I love Alicia Witt.
And then there were cameos.
I mean, you know, Loretta Devine and Brad Dourif,
and Baron Munchausen, John Neville.
I remember Michael Rosenbaum telling me,
he's like, "Oh my god, I got to work with
Robert Englund in Urban Legend.
It was so cool. He came in and he taught the class
and he was just fantastic."
Like, anyone who's a horror fan,
they just geek out when they're around Robert,
and he's just so, so sweet about it.
He's also a good sport.
We had to stuff him in the trunk of a car.
Now think about that.
The trunk of the car is not really big enough.
And so you have to really squash the poor guy in there.
And then you're gonna close the lid.
I wasn't always playing the villain.
Sometimes I was the red herring.
The last thing you expect to see is Professor Wexler.
He's still a suspect in our minds.
I began to explore another kind of role
and mature into another kind of role.
I... I was very proud of the film.
I call it the Lawrence of Arabia
of horror films, because of the look of it.
I'm very proud of that film.
And that movie was a hit, you know.
Urban Legend was a genuine, authentic hit.
I always forget that, you know,
because some of my movies aren't hits
and then some of them are.
When I was doing V,
NBC asked me to go do a Thanksgiving Day Parade.
I did the parade and I get down off the float
at the end and I hear "Bralalalalalala."
And this Harley with an extended fork pulls up
and this gorgeous guy with blond hair going down his back
and a big beard and he's muscular,
and he goes, "Mr. Englund, I want to show you my ink."
And he takes off his vest.
From his neck to his elbows
is a tattoo of Freddy and Jason grappling.
It's a fan question since 1984.
"Hey, Mr. Englund, dude, who do you think would win, man,
if Jason and Freddy threw down?"
It's that same thing that happened in the 1930s,
a kid turned to another kid and said during the Depression,
"Who do you think would win
between Frankenstein and the Wolfman?"
So this is this... it's an adolescent fantasy.
Even after Jason Goes To Hell,
they were talking about Freddy versus Jason.
Wasn't just about seeing Freddy versus Jason,
it was seeing Robert versus Kane.
That's what we wanted.
I was called into New Line Cinema,
had a lunch meeting with an executive.
She gave me the script, said,
"We're finally doing this movie."
And I was so excited.
When I'm given the script and said,
"We're finally doing this movie,"
I tend to think I have the job.
My understanding was Kane had the part.
Kane was offered the role.
In the weeks following, I... I knew something was wrong.
Something... something was not going as I expected
and had in the past, so I knew something was not good.
During pre-production,
Ken Kirzinger walked in the office in Vancouver.
Ronnie's sitting there, the director,
and he looks up and there's Ken Kirzinger
applying for the role of stunt coordinator.
Th... there had been a storyboard done,
and they'd elongated Jason.
He looked gigantic.
In Ronnie's mind's eye, he'd always seen Jason
as almost a silent, lumbering giant,
and Freddy's this little energetic, nagging junkyard dog.
Well, he saw Ken, and his...
you know, his wish was fulfilled.
And then I was finally told
that they were going with somebody else.
And he just hired Ken.
He said, "I want you to be my Jason."
It was devastating for me.
A very low point in my career that I had busted my ass
for almost 15 years playing that character.
Nobody wants to take the accountability for it.
And just replaced
and not even given the courtesy of saying why.
Nobody ever to this day has told me a decent reason why.
Just how shitty, man,
because they were both so excited
and waiting years for this to happen.
And, you know, obviously, Robert still got to do the film,
but I'm sure even for him,
it wasn't what he had always thought it was going to be.
Robert has been quoted as saying
that he always had pictured it
not so much as Freddy versus Jason,
but England versus Hodder.
That would have been nice, but at the same time,
I can't expect him not to do the movie.
I think Ken did a great job.
It's just, we wanted, we wanted Kane.
When I was eight years old,
Nightmare on Elm Street was on TV.
And I remember just thinking, "Oh, my god,
this is like the scariest thing I've ever seen."
I couldn't sleep. I had circles under my eyes.
I'd lost about ten pounds.
My doctor, Dr. Sergio, said, you know,
"What's going on with you? What's, what's the matter?"
And I said, "I can't tell you.
You won't understand."
And I guess I eventually said,
"Well, there's this guy. He's really scary.
He comes in the middle of the night
in your dreams and kills you."
And he was like, "From that Nightmare on Elm Street movie?
My wife watches those movies. They're not real."
And I was like, "They're not?"
I guess his recommendation to my mother
was to find a picture of Robert Englund
and a picture of Freddy Krueger
and to put them side by side near my bed.
And so every night before I went to sleep,
I used to like look at both of them and say like,
"Okay, that's the real guy.
That's... that's the fake guy.
And he's not real. He's not real. He's not real."
And I remember one of those nights thinking,
"You know what, I'm going to be an actress
when I grow up someday,
and I'm never going to make movies
that scare little kids." But I did.
Go to hell!
Freddy vs. Jason.
It was a hard shoot because I was getting old,
and I did a lot of my own stunts in that movie.
And it was cold because we had to go to
Camp Crystal Lake,
and they could only find one in Vancouver,
so we were up there in the cold.
I can tell you the first day I saw him
on set in makeup
was still jarring and somewhat traumatic for me,
which worked, you know, for my role and my character
and all of that.
I guess my saving grace in that is that...
I killed him.
So my eight-year-old self would be proud of me.
Ken and me were able to hide wetsuits
underneath our wardrobes.
But the actors, you know, young Jason Ritter,
and the beautiful Monica Keena, you know,
she has to be this sexy, femme fatale survivor girl.
There's nowhere for them to hide anything.
And there would never be a day that went by
that he wouldn't make sure that I had a coat on.
He was always sort of thinking of me
even before himself, which was very, very special.
They put in a hot tub.
And so after every take,
we'd run and jump in the hot tub.
It was right on the set. Monica and...
and Jason Ritter would pop in.
But we also had in the water for safety,
we had Navy SEALs,
in those state-of-the-art high-tech wetsuits
that are that thick.
All those guys wanted to do
is get in the hot tub with Monica.
So that was Freddy, Jason, Jason Ritter, Monica Keena,
and a couple of Navy SEALs in a hot tub.
It was like some demented orgy, you know.
With over 1,000 career kills,
he's come back to life seven times,
hailing from Elm Street, Freddy Krueger.
You've never seen an audience so gleeful.
It was like you combined Freddy
and you combined Jason and you combined WWE wrestling.
It was like the most gleeful, cinematic, orgasmic experience,
and the audience just went nuts.
That was big hit.
And that was a big international hit as well,
and it still looks great on a flat-screen
late at night with cold pizza and warm beer.
It holds up.
In the 2000s,
I was offered a lot of low-budget products.
Time to work.
I call him up and I'm like,
"Robert, there's this film that I'm working on,"
and he goes, "What's the name of it?"
I go, "It's called Zombie Strippers."
He goes, "I'll do it."
And I'm like, "What do you mean, you'll read it?"
"No, no, no. I'll do it.
With a name like that, it's gotta be good, right?"
Come on, let's do it, undead motherfuckers!
It was also great for me
to work with a lot of the new young directors
that were starting out.
Tim Sullivan, Adam Green,
and they're really talented young guys,
and they respect the genre.
He didn't make me feel like
I was a first-time filmmaker.
He completely trusted me,
which made it so much easier to direct him.
Shall we get started?
In Funhouse Massacre, Robert played our Warden Kane.
Welcome to no man's land, Miss Quinn.
Definitely the most high-profile actor
at that point I'd ever worked with.
This guy comes in
and he just takes his craft that serious.
It's just like, every character means something to him,
and he wants to contribute and stuff like that.
And that's what we did.
I learned a little from him, you know,
and I hope I passed on a little wisdom myself.
- Action! - Ride back.
Come on, guys, a lot of energy.
Come on!
I had done Detroit Rock City in 1998.
And at that point, I woke up one day
and I was like, I wanted to write and direct.
When I made that decision,
it just so happened that a guy named Chris Koban,
who ended up co-writing Maniacs with me,
got the right from Herschel Gordon Lewis
to remake all his films.
And I knew from the beginning
there was only one person that could play Mayor Buckman.
He said, "I had... I want to remake 2000 Maniacs
with Robert Englund as Buckman."
- I said, "Done. - Let's do it."
B mark.
Miss Peaches says y'all might be inclinin' to leave town.
Tim had approached me way back
during, I think, Nightmare 3 or 4.
He was working for Michael De Luca,
the producer then at New Line.
And I'm like, "Hey, Robert.
He goes, "How ya doing, Sullivan?", you know.
I go, "Well, I need you to play Buckman."
"I'll only do it if it's Hee-Haw on acid,
and I want to play him
as like a perverted Colonel Sanders."
Welcome to Pleasant Valley.
And what was exciting was getting to see
a great Robert Englund performance not in the makeup.
See, we gave him an eyepatch
and a scar and all kinds of stuff,
but I wanted to see Robert's face.
Well, don't be a wet ding-dong, fellas.
He comes totally prepared,
he works really hard on the material.
He really understands the content.
He asks a million questions, just like I do.
You know what I mean? We're both studied actors.
You know, we've had a lot of experience and...
but also a lot of schooling.
A mark. B mark.
I love the detail of the work and so does Robert.
Seems we have to impress a little etiquette upon you.
Ladies and gentlemen, shall we?
I played his wonderful wife,
Miss Granny Boone, who is, I like to say
is a cross between Scarlett O'Hara
and a black widow spider.
It's your maker, now, bitch.
2001 Maniacs was a very tough shoot.
I think we shot the movie in like 18 or 20 days,
and it was a huge cast and lots of kills.
And we, I mean, we did the movie barely for a million dollars.
So it was just one of those things
that everyone's doing it for the love of movies.
Yee-haw!
I think the problem we had
was our original set burned down in Hollywood.
And they moved to Georgia.
They found this village in Georgia,
where they'd moved all these antebellum, you know,
buildings from the 19th and 18th century.
Welcome to Pleasant Valley.
My cautioning to Tim was,
because we lost that set,
that's money that's gone up in flames.
That's time that we'll never get back.
And I said to Tim,
"This looks better than Hollywood's.
This is all real."
Robert was a part of it.
And Robert stayed with it through thick and thin.
We had this big finale,
which originally was this big fight scene,
and we had three nights scheduled for this.
And the Teamsters came one night and shut us down.
Yeah, we were doing it under the radar.
Unions are unions.
And I am suddenly told
that the three nights I had for this finale
would now be one.
The ending of Maniacs was pretty hectic.
Talk about being made on a shoestring.
You know, there were a lot of,
a lot of details that were difficult to complete.
I did not know what to do.
And Robert was like, "Wait a minute."
And he and Lin Shaye took me aside and they...
they said, "Let's think about this.
Why don't we just do something
where it's like a gauntlet of maniacs, you know,
the main two characters have to walk through
this maze of all the maniacs,
but every joke they said before
will now be turned into a tragic truth."
We were under... under pressure.
I mean, God, I don't think we ever did
more than two or three takes.
That was Robert coming to the rescue.
It's not just a monster movie.
It was really about avenging what was done to us
during the Civil War.
And gratefully I think we got a wonderful end to the film,
and I think the Teamsters were fine and dandy.
I love Lin Shaye.
I've worked with Lin several times.
We did a film together called The Midnight Man.
And again, the reason I wanted to do it
was because of Robert.
He called me up on the phone
and was pitching this movie to me.
That's a nice little traditional horror movie
in the vein of, you know,
the game children shouldn't play.
I remember we had a scene together
in The Midnight Man, which was my idea, actually.
But Robert was so thrilled with it because
it was sort of that we were family in the moment.
And we're actually very hostile towards each other
and I end up killing him.
I like him.
We... we became really, we... I really like him.
He's a great person as well as a wonderful actor.
You have no idea who you're dealing with.
So how will this play out?
How will this work?
You won't like what you see,
I promise you that.
The rise of Leslie Vernon, Behind the Mask.
It's a great little film.
And it deconstructs horror on so many levels.
When I first got the script for Behind The Mask,
one of the big selling points was this is going to be
Robert Englund not playing the nemesis.
This is him playing the hero,
which goes against type completely.
His name is Leslie Mann Cousteau,
from Reno, Nevada.
The approach was to go to Robert
for the role of Eugene.
Robert sort of prophetically and wisely said,
"Well, I don't know if that's really the role for me."
And I think you had had more of a conversation with him
about how that actually came about, didn't you, or...?
No.
Okay, good toss.
It was a chance for me
to do a little salute to Donald Pleasance.
What Robert brought to the table
was, yeah, I could do the Eugene thing.
I could be the retired killer, and everybody would expect that.
And this, by the way,
was before he'd seen frame one
of anything that we'd been working on.
He didn't know what he'd gotten himself into.
But he just jumped in.
That's not true. He told me he loved the script.
And it was entirely the script.
I said frame one, not the script.
The script was, yeah, brilliant. Of course.
That's better.
We got really lucky
because he is an unbelievable professional.
But then he also took everybody under his wing.
The kids were great.
I saw scenes with Nathan Baesel, who played Leslie Vernon.
That's a wonderful, wonderful performance.
He pulled me aside after one of the takes,
and he said, "You're just fantastic.
You know, you remind me of the young Anthony Perkins.
Has anyone ever told you that?"
And after hearing that, I felt like I could do anything.
He became an unconscionable prick.
He was absolutely intolerable
- to be around. - I felt like
I had been, you know, knighted.
Leslie!
No more.
It ends here.
Presence alone was enough.
He could have just walked in and cashed the paycheck
but he plugged himself in fully,
a hundred percent right from the beginning.
Seeing him pop up on the screen
ultimately does nothing but elevate the status
of Behind the Mask. That's his...
ultimately his gift to the... to the project.
Is that what you meant?
Yeah. Thanks for saving me again.
Please, don't kill me.
That's my line?
- Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Last Showing, I know that's the English way of saying
the midnight movie.
I wanted to call it at least for American audiences
Midnight Movie,
and I knew that movie was low budget,
but I also knew we were in the confines of one set
and this very small cast.
You're not allowed in here anymore.
I corrected the aspect on your screen three.
He's so good in that.
Just a very complete character.
Please do not hurt her again.
Allie! Allie, this.
This is the guy.
I saw what you did.
I've called the police.
It was a rough shoot
because the movie theater we were working on,
we were supposed to have it until noon.
I remember the Minion movie was so big
this mall cinema in Chester had an extra-early screening.
Finn and I, we have blood all over us,
and it's like a quarter to 11; there's an 11 a.m. screening.
And we walk through the lobby.
All the schoolchildren are coming to see
their Minion movie.
And as they walk in,
Emily Barrington, Finn Jones, and Robert Englund
are walking out drenched in blood, you know.
These poor little English schoolgirls
going to see the Minions and instead,
they see the three of us walking out, you know.
I'm really proud.
It's some of the best work I've done in years.
And that's because of Phil Hawkins giving me freedom
and also giving me really good notes
and letting me discover stuff.
I talk about this film all the time
because I want more people to see it.
There's an effects artist slash writer slash director
named Robert Greene Hall.
He called me up and he said,
"Hey, your old buddy Robert is coming over for a life cast.
You wanna come say hi?"
I'm like, "Sure."
It's a movie called Fear Clinic
that Rob had co-written and was set to direct.
The webisode portion of Fear Clinic
came out great.
And it was so hard
because we were learning to tell segmented stories.
We had, you know, you only get 15, 20 minutes
for each little webisode.
But the effects were brilliant, and we had a wonderful cast.
Kane was part of that project.
Robert Hall had it all in his head,
but he didn't necessarily share that all with us.
He brought us together and said,
"You know, never had you guys face off in the big movie,
so let's kind of have a face-off in this,"
and that was kind of fun.
When we got to the film,
we got Corey Taylor from Slipknot.
It's okay. Ma'am, I need you to come with me.
I walk onto set.
And I was like, "Oh, this is gonna be cool, you know,
being in a fucking movie."
And I turn around,
and holy shit, there's Robert Englund.
He was very cool.
And I'm just staring at him the entire time, like
such a fucking fanboy, dude.
And it was like, I was like, "Oh, okay."
I'm infected, as well as everybody else,
from this sort of hyperbolic chamber
that removes people's paranoias and fears.
But the idea was that within
that kind of coffin-like device,
there's a residue of everyone's fears.
No. Blake.
Blake!
What... what's happening?
One of the things we built
was a huge, pulsating cocoon, and it eats...
at the climax of the film,
it eats this fear creature that we had made,
and it spits out Robert.
And it never crossed my mind that he would be naked.
He had to be naked, right?
I mean, why would he have clothes on
when he gets spit out of this cocoon?
So Robert just drops his clothes
and he's just standing there naked
in front of the whole crew.
I'm an old man now. I don't care, you know.
I got man... we call 'em man tits now.
And he gets down on the floor in a fetal position.
He goes, and he goes,
"Steve, Steve. Get over here."
Because... because the cocoon was covered
with this weird kind of spiderwebby, silicone meshy,
slimy stuff, and he goes,
"You got to cover up my cock and balls."
And I'm like, "What?"
You could see my massive manhood.
Oh, my fucking god.
What do I do now?
It was very, very cold.
That's the hard part.
Fuck.
So I think that might be
one of the highest or lowest points of my career.
I had to slime up Robert's cock.
You know what the cold does to one's manhood.
It only took about that much.
Sorry, Robert.
As long as I'm going to be naked,
you know, I want to be bountiful.
You know.
You shrivel up and my body parts go inside me
to live where it's warm.
Wednesday...
A Nightmare on Goldbergs Street.
One, two, Freddy's coming for Shmoo.
- No. - Huh?
I had waited a long time.
And my agent, Joe Rice,
his favorite show with his family was The Goldbergs.
He'd been approached by Adam Goldberg.
It's such an '80s self-referential show itself.
It's almost a Valentine to the 1980s.
Robert Englund takes on The Goldbergs.
I had such fun doing that show.
Even though I respect the character of Freddy Krueger,
I think I was finally able to have fun with it a little bit.
I get to work with Wendy McLendon.
I was such a fan of hers since Bridesmaids
and I knew all my stuff was going to be with her.
And there was this great gag about how every time I swore
or said anything dirty,
we knew it was going to be bleep-bleeped out.
This is getting way too touchy-feely
- for this cowboy. - Time to die!
She's not afraid of Freddy.
And at the end, she just goes off on a rant.
She just leaves me standing there.
And the original ending was I would just turn to the camera
and go, "Now that's some prime time bitch."
I say the around here, lady.
Not anymore, Mister Kroger.
Krueger. It's Krueger.
Hah!
Stranger Things,
the scary season or the horror season,
I was invited to do an episode.
I was feeling great about it because I had read
for the Cary Elwes role,
the mayor in season three,
and didn't get it.
I had been, I was disappointed
because I loved the show so much.
It's not that he didn't get it.
It's that somebody else did get it.
I mean, you know. I mean, actors.
There's only one role.
There's only one... only one actor is gonna get it.
And then, when they asked me to do this role,
I COVID auditioned in my own plain,
all-white little bathroom, and I made it look kind of just,
you know, my... my character against the all-white.
But anyway, they liked it, you know.
I had it learned, was all ready to go, you know,
chomping at the bit, get my plane ticket
and then COVID,
and then COVID and then COVID.
So we finally shot it late spring, early summer.
He has this long speech.
And after it, he got like a love note
from one of the other cast members saying,
"I didn't even know that was good.
I didn't even know that that character
was interesting until you did that amazing performance
and just blew us all away."
It does have this sort of dusting
all over season four of frame of reference
of Nightmare on Elm Street.
You know, I think Wes, Wes Craven
would have been very pleased.
You know, what else is fun about being in Stranger Things
is all those parents that come to Comic Cons
and ask for the autograph, you know,
and they bring their kids
who don't know who the hell I am, you know.
But now that I'm showing up in these cameos,
it's kind of fun that I'm crossing that...
that generational boundary.
He just nailed it.
"That's Freddy Krueger.
That's the guy that played Freddy Krueger.
I told you you'd like him," you know.
No, I assure you.
I am still very much in hell.
Robert Englund!
You're all my children now.
There are horror conventions every weekend
all over the world.
And one thing I think
the internet and social media has done,
it's really, really brought the horror culture
and horror audience together.
When you see the film,
you're probably way too young to see it.
So you spend the rest of your whole life
at Comic Cons and things like that
trying to recapture that original excitement.
And they're happy to revisit it,
hoping the lighter still has gas in it.
Robert has a connection with his fans
that few others have.
I've heard of kind of superstar icons
who literally don't even look at you
when you come buy... buy the autograph.
I'm always amazed at actors
that sit there like they're miserable
that they have to be there.
Nobody's making you be there.
So don't do it if you don't like it.
You got to be careful about meeting the people you like
because sometimes they'll disappoint you.
Robert handles the fans great.
I love how he interacts with people.
If I could sum it up,
it really does come down to all of his personal appearances
and the fact that he's so fetching a personality
and fun, and loves the character.
Never, ever have I seen him rush through
signing an autograph for somebody.
Anybody who went to a convention
where Robert Englund was at
would leave feeling, "He's my friend."
You don't feel stupid as a fan
when your time has finally arrived
and you've waited forever.
He looks right at you
the whole time he's speaking to you,
and... whether it's 30 seconds or two minutes...
and for that moment, you are the most important.
There's nobody else in that room.
I think he completes what his fans expect from him,
and then gives them a little bit extra
that is surprising and gracious.
It's part of the gift.
It's part of the experience people are looking for
at a convention. And they get it.
I always like when we're sitting
close to each other, because,
the banter that we have with the fans,
then the banter with each other that the fans enjoy...
you know, it's always fun.
It makes their week or their...
their year to be able to meet Robert Englund.
So, horror has exploded exponentially
in a way that I don't think anyone ever really saw coming.
And it's great to see Robert getting the love from the fans.
You know, when my son recently died of brain cancer,
he was the first to call me
and he would always offer me great advice about,
you know, how to move forward and, you know, get, you know,
just be strong, and offered, you know, he was always like,
"Heather, Heather, Heather."
You know, he always says my name like seven times
before he tells me what he's gonna tell me.
And it's always, you know,
it always comes from this humongous heart
that he has for people.
I've never seen him leave somebody without a smile.
The fact that the fans are still there for him,
there's still power to all of the things
that he's done before.
And anything that he does after that
is going to have that kind of weight,
so it's, to me, it's a testimony to his talent.
It's a testimony to the characters
that he helped bring to life.
There's nothing that endures more
than something that is simple and yet sophisticated.
It endures,
and that's the kind of character he... he created,
and-and audiences loved him for that.
What he can do with words is alchemy.
I'm a huge fan of the man Robert Englund,
of the actor Robert Englund.
There really is nothing like sitting in a theater
and watching a movie on the big screen.
And when you see something like a Robert Englund,
who is bigger than life in his own way,
created a character that for whatever reason,
people have just devoured.
There are iconic horror actors:
Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee.
Robert is definitely in the latter category.
There's a weird thing that happens
with these monsters we love.
Karloff is the great example, I think,
where no matter how heinous he is
or his character is on screen,
there's a separate little part of our brain
that says, "I love this guy."
There's a likability that in no way impinges
or weakens the frightening power of the performance.
But you kinda feel good.
And I think Robert is absolutely one of those guys.
I think we just, we like him.
Karloff was in his mid-40s,
worried about where his career was going,
or more importantly, wasn't going
when Frankenstein fell out of the clear blue sky for him.
He talked about "My dear old monster"
and said "I owe him everything."
And I have to say the same thing really.
An actor's greatest enemy is anonymity.
And if you have anything that puts you on anybody's radar,
you should be eternally thankful.
Years and years ago, I met and became
a very close friend of Vincent Price.
And I said to him one day, "Vincent, isn't it frustrating
that you got sort of typecast into this one kind of thing?"
And he said, "Oh, my dear, no. Are you kidding?"
You know, he said, "First of all,
I've been able to keep working all the time,
which a lot of actors don't get that opportunity.
And do I enjoy the iconic stage aspect of it?
Of course I do. I mean, I'm an actor.
You know, who wouldn't?"
And I think it's absolutely perfect
that Robert should be considered
among the pantheon of the stars,
any of those that have captured the public's imagination
in such a way that they want to keep seeing
more and more and more of them.
You can't control a career.
I have friends that are
infinitely more talented than I am
that made terrible mistakes
saying no at the wrong time, saying yes too many times
to underpaid artistic projects that nobody ever saw.
And it hurts their reputation because those movies all bombed.
But by sticking with the horror genre,
by being loyal to it, now I'm playing
the old scientist, the old priest,
the guy that tells you the legend of whatever
the backstory is, and I enjoy them.
And because I've been around the genre so long,
I know how they're... I know how to play them.
I remembered at some point, that as a child,
I too, was a horror fan.
And I remembered little Robbie Englund
going to his godfather's house,
and he had entire rooms in his home
full of coffee table books.
And I remember getting this big coffee table book
about Life magazine goes to the movies,
and in the golden age of horror section,
looking at pictures of Frankenstein
and the little girl by that river
before he breaks her,
and an entire page of the makeups of Lon Chaney,
and being fascinated with that as a kid.
And yet that had all gone away.
I had erased all of that.
I'd erased that Robbie Englund,
that boy who mowed lawns so he could go see
Angry Red Planet and Forbidden Planet,
who stayed up until midnight to watch
the Late Late Show of Frankenstein unedited.
And at some point, that all came rushing back to me.
And I realized
those are the teenagers, those are the young adults now,
that I mean so much to
because they're preserving that experience
of sitting in the dark and feeling alive
by being frightened, by being scared.
I started to respect it on a whole different level.
And I said to myself,
"All right, I'll be. I'll step a little bit..."
and I came out saying,
and I wouldn't be presumptuous by saying
that I could fill their shoes,
but I'd step into the shoes a bit
of the late Klaus Kinski...
of the late Vincent Price.
And nobody else was doing it.
It's just been a great happy accident to my career.
I'm having this great afterlife as an actor within the genre.
And I'm just grateful for that
because it's just something I never would have expected.
Something I wasn't planning.
It's just something that happened.