Exclusive Interview: Robert Englund’s Favorite NIGHTMARE Sequel, Freddy Kill, One-Liner + The Reason Johnny Depp Was Cast
JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales is a new, twisted, fun take on the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White. The charm and cuteness of the original stories remain, but now they’ve been updated and packaged into a ball of raw, visceral, gross weirdness. The animated quarter-hour series is created, and executive produced by JJ Villard (King Star King) and produced by Cartoon Network Studios.
Look for JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales to premiere Sunday, May 10th at 12:15 a.m. ET/PT
Voice talent this season includes Linda Blair, Warwick Davis, Corey Feldman, Alan Oppenheimer, Jennifer Tilly, and Robert Englund, who we were lucky enough to chat with recently.
While we start off talking about JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales, the conversation inevitably turned to A Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy Krueger. So, what could he tell me that hasn’t already be reported before? Read on to find out!
Dread Central: So tell us about the characters your voicing in JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales?
Robert Englund: This is my favorite addition to my resume; keeps you humble. If you go way, way back on my resume, I think in the theater I was “Robot #2” in a production of R.U.R. [Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti], a famous Czech play that sort of coined the word robot. and that’s one of my favorite resume inclusions, like “Bad Guy #2” on Charlie’s Angels. In my “Goldilocks” and the Three Bears episode of JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales, I’m one of the bears with his head stuck in the beehive because he was trying to get to the honey. I’m also a character called “Porridge Daddy” who is really a gob of snot. I’m Goldilocks’s father and I’ve been turned into a gob of snot, and I’m also a toilet. So on my IMDB, my resume is going to be saying “Porridge Daddy”, “Hive Head” and “Toilet”. It’ll be there for the rest of my life, and that will keep me humble I think.
DC: So, I think I know the answer but I’d like to hear your take: What do you think makes Fairy Tales so appealing to horror fans?
RE: Well you know, Fairy Tales originally, before Walt Disney and politically correct parents got a hold of them, were really dark stuff. They were cautionary tales, warnings about things in life that could happen, telling us there was evil in the world and cloaking it in a story and narrative.
You think about Hansel and Gretel, they were a product of the Brothers Grimm. There was a huge famine in Germany, and one later on in Ireland, and to keep the children in line and well behaved they would threaten them with evicting them from the house. And, of course, there was very little food in the house, but they knew if they were kicked out of the house they would starve to death. What’s the first thing that happens if you’re beginning to starve? You hallucinate. And if you were a child and you were starving and hallucinating, you’d hallucinate a house made of cake and ice cream and candy and sugar and icing and of course that’s Hansel and Gretel. That’s the dark element, the cautionary tale. Wes Craven uses it in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Instead of bread crumbs being left in the woods by Hansel and Gretel, the little boy uses sleeping pills as a trail for his mother to find, but it’s that great darkness that is the root and origin of Fairy Tales. Even though the JJ Villard Fairy Tales are more in the world of satire, of the old Jay Ward Fractured Fairy Tales, from the Rocky and Bullwinkle days but still, they’re also kind of pun: Bevis and Butthead, Rick and Morty, the same kind of rough, raw, twisted kind of gross humor. And I think more than dark, it’s really deconstructed and gross, which is what I really like.
I got to work actually with the pencils, storyboards of the show and it was really helpful but kind of strange, Josh. Usually they have a picture of the character, it’s the best they can do if you’re doing voice work early. But it was really fun seeing these rough little pencil drawing, the storyboard sequences; they gave me a sense of the style and the energy and just how off the wall the show was.
DC: It really is off the wall. I’ve seen the first three episodes and it’s just nuts. Talking about animation some more, Mark Hamill made a huge splash as the voice of the Joker in the Batman animated movies. Are there any iconic animated characters that you’d be interested in providing the voices for?
RE: Speaking of Batman I’m the voice of The Riddler on The Batman TV series and I’m The Vulture in The Spectacular Spider-Man. That show was so good and I’m so disappointed it got cancelled because most of the time I got my ass kicked by Spider-Man. I was just yelling! I really didn’t get to my big giant Vulture episode yet, only flying around, barking out a couple lines. I didn’t really get into the character in terms of lots of dialogue, that was a disappointment but I love animation.
A couple of years ago I got lost in Burbank near Hollywood and I was the new branch of Walt Disney Studios. But they brought me in there for some weird project that had never been made but it was such a great idea. It reminds me a little bit of the guy who does the Funko Pop toys, and this was sort of a movie about all of the retired characters from television and advertising, hanging out together, they were kind of like combating something. So Snap, Crackle and Pop from Rice Krispies, Tony the Tiger, Speedy Alka-Seltzer and all those characters were together in this movie, and I can’t remember what part I was up for, but it was just such a great, strange, bizarre idea and I was always hoping that thing would get made. All of our pop culture ideas and advertising coming together for some reason. They had to stop something, I can’t remember what it was, but I just loved it. I’m sure the problem was they couldn’t get the rights to all of those characters.
DC: Do you think Nightmare on Elm Street would make a great animated series?
Robert: I think Nightmare on Elm Street done as a dark, graphic novel style movie would be great; a ninety-minute graphic novel. What I would do is, I would do that, then I would do a prequel movie. And then I would go into rebooting the rest of the franchise, using new special effects and technologies, new casts for new versions of the franchise for a new audience. But I think it would be great to start it out with a great graphic novel, Nightmare on Elm Street 1. That would be fun, in that great, graphic novel style, kind of noir style.
DC: You mentioned a Nightmare on Elm Street prequel. How do imagine a prequel unfolding?
RE: There was a great script going around, I think it was called Kruger: The First Kills. I’m not sure if I’m right about that, though. At one time they wanted John McNaughton to do it and it was Freddy as a killer and the cops have to catch him. So, it’s the two bumbling police detectives that finally catch him, but then here’s where it gets interesting: The whole middle and ending of the movie is the courtroom. It becomes a courtroom drama with Freddy in jail, and Freddy going to court every day. And then the two courthouse lawyers, the ambulance chasing lawyers, they get Freddy off, and those are the best parts. Freddy’s in the courtroom, and he takes the stand, and the parents of the victims take the stand with the lawyers blaming the parents for alcoholism and opioid use. It’s crazy. And in the end, the parents just taking the law into their own hands and burning Freddy alive. I heard about that at a Monster Party a few years ago, from a guy working at New Line and I thought that’s the one. It’s a little bit like what Toby Hooper did for the pilot on the television series. When Freddy’s Nightmares still had money and the original producers, they took ten days to shoot them back then and they gave Toby free reign. That’s why the pilot is so good for that show.
DC: I want to switch gears a little bit here. You were a really huge proponent of Mark Patton’s documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street. I was wondering what you think of Freddy’s Revenge’s reputation as “the gayest horror movie ever made” and that film’s evolving legacy?
RE: I don’t know if it’s the gayest. Maybe The Hunger with Susan Sarandon, David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. That’s pretty great gay horror. But I feel that was definitely a subtext. If you were to remake Nightmare 2 now you could further. And you could see the fun of Freddy manipulating Mark Patton’s character, and knowing subconsciously Mark was gay and playing with him, playing with that. And playing with the Robert Rusler character because Freddy knows their subconscious; he knows their dreams and that’s what we were doing. We were hinting about that in the movie.
What was amazing to me about Mark’s documentary was I didn’t know any of that stuff about AIDS and what had happened to his partners and everything and what he went through. He was just ahead of the curve at that time because AIDS had just hit in Hollywood. Everybody was kind of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and I think it was very frustrating for Mark at that moment in time. I knew about Mark before, as a little theater actor, I’d heard great stories about Mark in the wonderful Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. He did the play before he did the movie with Cher and the great Sandy Denis. So I knew he was in this great play and, you know, maybe Mark should have gone back to New York after Nightmare 2 and done another play. Maybe that would have been the wisest choice. He was so involved with his partner and his illness in LA and I didn’t know any of that, and it was just really eye opening, that documentary.
My wife and I, one of our great regrets, is that we never got down to Puerto Vallarta which is where they shot that great movie Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, directed by John Huston. But my wife and I never got down there and apparently Mark had this great art gallery in the lush, beautiful foothills of Puerto Vallarta. Mark knew everybody down there, all the secret B&B’s. I just wish I had gone down and share the time with Mark. I kept meaning to; I just never got down there. I would have loved to see that town through his eyes.
DC: Since we’re talking about Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, I’m just curious: What’s your favorite Nightmare on Elm Street sequel?
RE: Oh, I think Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the best. It’s meta, it’s deconstructed, and he made it for the fans. You can watch it over and over again and it holds up. It’s really good on DVD and Blu-ray and there’s some great hidden Easter Eggs in it. I tell people, watch Heather Langenkamp playing Heather Langenkamp. Watch her go to visit her husband’s set, the Wes Craven movie, with her husband doing special effects. Watch her costume: It slowly shifts and it’s really interesting to watch her wardrobe. It’s kind of like the kid in jeopardy; that’s a real Guillermo Del Toro troupe, to have a child in jeopardy. A kind of child witness through the horror. He does it in Mimic, he does it in a lot of his films; he has the child witness and I think it’s a great troupe, a great hook and Wes does it in New Nightmare.
DC: What’s your personal favorite Freddy Kruger kill?
RE: I think it’s the boy in part six with the hearing aid. That’s a good one. It’s so politically incorrect.
DC: What’s your personal favorite Freddy Kruger one-liner?
RE: Well I like mine, the one I came up with, which was, “Welcome to prime time, bitch!”. There were some good one-liners in Freddy vs Jason too.
DC: Speaking of Freddy vs. Jason, we’ve all heard that there were storyboards for a final scene that would have included Pinhead from Hellraiser. Who do you think would win in a fight between Freddy and Pinhead?
RE: Oohh…you know Doug Bradley’s an old pal. We did a couple of movies together and we did some CD projects of H.P. Lovecraft together. I really like Doug. I don’t know…I think the baseline is if anybody has to sleep, even the sleep of stupidity like Jason, even a dumb, passed out monster sleep… If they encounter Freddy and they sleep, at some point in whatever their world is Freddy can get to them. So that means Freddy would win, if he can get to you and manipulate you and exploits something that scares you or hurts you or that you’re afraid of or that can kill you.
DC: Robert, it’s been great talking to you. I’m a journalist so I’d like to get something unique and juicy. Can you tell me something about A Nightmare on Elm Street that’s never been reported or that you’ve never told anyone before?
RE: I think I’ve told all the secrets… Oh, maybe you don’t know this: I think the reason Johnny Depp got the part was Wes Craven’s daughter threatened her dad. She was like “Dad, if you don’t cast him, I’m leaving home!” So, I think she was the real selling point for Johnny getting the role: Wes Craven’s daughter.
Are you a fan of Robert Englund? Are you excited to check out JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales this weekend? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! You can also carry on the convo with me personally on Twitter @josh_millican.
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