Source: BBC Author: Jane Crowther
Originally Published: 18 May 2001
What horror films made an impression on you?
“Salem’s Lot” really had an effect on me, really caught my imagination. Like you know when vampires fly through the window and just stand up? On this movie I kept saying ‘can’t I just float along?’ and they were like, ‘no’.
How much input did you have in creating this new cool Dracula?
Not an awful lot. I had a lot of ideas about the way I wanted to look but pretty much none of them happened. I mean, there were twelve guys making the decisions for me.
Was your dialogue always so sparse?
No, it wasn’t. I guess I didn’t do very well cos they cut a lot of it out! It was like, (adopts American accent) “no, no, we wanna cool effect – he doesn’t have to talk”.
There are a lot of stunts in the film – what was the most dangerous thing you did?
I spent nine hours in make-up, then I had contact lenses put in, had a harness shoved right up my groin and then hung upside down from a wire. I think that’s really quite unpleasant! I kept biting myself with my teeth and when I went to bite people’s necks I’d really go for it and I scratched everybody’s necks. And contact lenses – couldn’t get them in for about forty minutes and I was crying. It nearly killed me. Oh, and on my final day I had to be tied up in swamp water and there was an alligator about twenty feet away that everyone was feeding with turkey!
