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Speaking of where he can go: Are you going to play the part again, and where will Dracula go from here? Are you going to appear in the announced monster films?
I think so. I think there’s definitely… I’ve had the conversations, and if it happens, I’d be very happy to be playing Dracula in a future “episode.”
You’ve played Dracula, and Apollo, and Zeus, and even one of the Three Musketeers. Do you have an ongoing interest in playing classical characters?
I think playing Apollo was my first ever film role. It sort of set the ball rolling on people’s ideas on what I could do. You play a god once, you play a god twice, and you sort of set the ball rolling. People say “He can deal with big epic character in big sweeping period dramas and movies.” Yeah, it’s interesting how that happened. Interestingly, all the movies I’m doing this year, all of them are contemporary. All of them are much smaller in size. Very character driven. So this year’s going to be a very interesting departure from what I’ve been doing for the past few years.
Last year I did High-Rise with Ben Wheatley. That book and that film are based in the ’70s. And it’s a completely different story and character. So it’s about finding the right roles and not getting too ties up with… [sighs] I get offered a lot of period stuff, and I have to be very careful. I don’t want to do only that stuff. I want to do all kinds of exciting stuff as well as that.
Can you tell me more about High-Rise? Because I love the J.G. Ballard novel.
If you’ve read the book, then you know it’s a hard going. Hard going, that book. I find it really… really dark. But yeah, it’s been 30 years in the making. That book’s been nearly made into a movie a number of times. Many, many versions of the script have been done. But I believe Ben and his wife Amy [Jump] wrote this amazing draft, and I think that’s was the script they wanted to make.
I think [producer] Jeremy Thomas has handled all the other Ballard films. He saw a bright light in Bean Wheatley, and I think he’s right. Ben’s a very talented director. He’s got a really fresh take on the way he directs, and I really enjoyed it. It was a really fast-paced shoot. It took seven weeks. I’m Richard Wilder. He’s the agitator, he’s described as the agitator in the book. But as the story unfolds, and it gets more and more dystopian and crazy and socially very wrong, you see a man who is not as crazy as everything thought at the beginning of the film. And I liked playing that. Even though you know he’s a man on the edge, there’s also a slight humanity about him. The other characters in the film lose that very, very quickly.
It was really enjoyable. I remember having a chat with Jeremy Thomas the producer – a true legend in the producing world – and he said that films like this don’t get made anymore. So I feel like I’ve been part of something very special. And I think It’ll be a story people will be quite shocked at, but also something people won’t get to see on a screen very often. So I’m happy that I did it. I’m happy that I’m going to do his next film as well, which is Free Fire about a 1970s arms deal that does terribly wrong in Boston. Exciting stuff.
What was the first record you bought with your own money?
First record was… let me think… it was The Hit Factory. Stock Aitken Waterman. They used to have a hit factory. They were Tootsie Roll men with glasses. They weren’t very cool at all, and they wrote all these amazing songs for a bunch of pop stars from the 1980s. Like Rick Astley, Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue, Mel and Kim, Salt ‘n’ Pepa. No, wait. Not Salt ‘n’ Pepa. But a lot of these ’80s groups. You don’t even know half of those people, do you?
I do. Give me some credit.
You do? Okay then, challenge accepted: Chesney Hawkes was on there. Hazel Dean, Sinitta. All of them were on this one record. An LP. I remember all the pictures on the front. Yeah. That was my first.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
