DRAC IN ACTION
Think your boss is bad?
RENFIELD DIRECTOR CHRIS MCKAY STARRING NICOLAS CAGE,
NICHOLAS HOULT, AWKWAFINA ETA 14 APRIL
Remember Renfield? Probably not, since Dracula’s lackey has never stepped out of his boss’s shadow before. All that changes in 2023 when Renfield falls in love – forcing the Count to finally start giving him the performance review that’s at least 500 years overdue.
“It’s a story about a bad boss. The boss from Hell, actually. Literally,” laughs director Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War, The Lego Batman Movie). “It’s an R-rated co-dependency comedy. I loved the idea of being able to take something that you’ve seen a million times and do something different with it. Robert Kirkman from The Walking Dead had a great pitch, and Ryan Ridley came in from Rick And Morty and wrote a really funny script. It’s got charm, it’s full of action and horror, and it’s got lot of splat-stick comedy in the vein of something like Evil Dead 2 or Zombieland or Deadpool.”
Casting Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road) as Renfield and Awkwafina (The Farewell) as the traffic cop he falls for, the bigger challenge for McKay was finding the right Prince Of Darkness – someone who was willing to spend 14 hours a day in make-up, who could strike the right balance between scary, charming and downright odd. Enter Nicolas Cage.
“He refers to himself as ‘The California Kinski’,” laughs McKay. “Our Dracula is this gaslighting narcissist, right? So Cage is playing it like an abusive spouse. And sometimes he’s playing it like Anne Bancroft from The Graduate. He likes to mix things up. His Dracula is very… unique.”
Also drawing inspiration from his own father, Cage helps keep Renfield dancing between genres to make an action/horror/ comedy/romance with a suitably weird edge. Throw in a stake-shooting crossbow, a throne made of blood bags and a church set-piece shot around a (real) New Orleans storm, and Renfield is shaping up to give Dracula’s creepy henchman the spotlight he’s always deserved.