Before Robert Englund was killing high school kids in Nightmare on Elm Street, he was a kid in high school in Buster & Billie. How cute was the 26-year-old in that 1974 movie?
Englund posted this on Instagram about his late co-star, “Beautiful boy… RIP Jan-Michael Vincent. My first movie star co-star back in 1973. Remember him by watching Richard Brooks’s BITE THE BULLET with his “sister” Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman. Or John Milius’s BIG WEDNESDAY or with me in BUSTER & BILLIE.”
Freddy Kruger’s Fedora hat is as synonymous with him as his glove with knives and green and red striped sweater but almost did not happen.
Robert Englund told Yahoo Entertainment that Wes Craven wanted the Fedora but they wanted to try out some other types. They tried paperboy hats, baseball caps and they were not working for the actor. Therefore, he went to the director and showed him why his first choice was the right choice.
As we know he won out. Which is a good thing because a baseball cap would have struck out.
When The Goldbergs ended last season, they got Rick Moranis to reprise his role of Dark Helmut from Spaceballs. This season, they have another 1980somthing legend reprising his role in disguise for Halloween. One that has been haunting our nightmares since 1984. Of course, it is Robert Englund, but you probably know him as Freddy Krueger.
The ABC sitcom broke the news today, and I am so excited because I love the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. But I am surprised that the real Adam F. Goldberg went there because yesterday he tweeted this about Englund retiring from the role, “NO! There’s only one Freddy! Robert Englund can’t retire! Elm Street 3 scared the CRAP out of me when I was a kid. I was so terrified I slept in the hallway for a week, but then became a superfan. Someone has to do something to keep the nightmares alive!” To me, 3 was the best one and so not scary. I laughed at some of the kills like the girl who got her chance to be in TV and the roach motel girl. So funny.
It is not about me, it about another great get for The Goldbergs. Although, why is it whenever these actors reprise their characters on the show, they declare they will never do them again? Things that make you go hmmmm? Oh, wait that is a song from the ’90somthing.
Anyways, The Goldbergs pays homage to Sixteen Candles for Adam’s 16th birthday next Wednesday on ABC.
You know how they tell actors to break a leg? Well Robert Englund accidentally took them literally because somehow he broke his foot. He didn’t say how he did it, so we are left to assume how. I will say he did it by tripping over all the bodies of the teenagers he killed because Freddy Krueger and him are the same person. Right?
I know his pain. Back when I was 20, I broke my foot in a car accident. Like him, I had an open cast. Unlike him I had kitten in heat with long claws showing by broken wing some love instead of dog kissing the booboo trying to make it feel better. His is cute and mine left me crying in pain.
Back to the dog licking his foot, how cute is to see one of the cinema’s scariest actors get some arforable care? It doesn’t make him seem so terrifying.
Here’s little tip to him, he will need those metal claws to get to those inevitable itches you can’t scratch. I wish I had them, instead I used one the sticks from those huge lollipops because those plastic knives on the A Nightmare on Elm Street glove do not do it. I tried it.
Robert Englund is starring in Lake Placid: The Final Chapter tonight on Syfy at 9p, but what scares one of the scariest people in the world?
I was recently on a conference call with him and here is what Freddy Krueger said terrified him:
Nothing really scares me. When I did the first Nightmare film, I mean there’s films that scare me, I just even got a jolt the other night watching Cabin in the Woods. And I remember the original Alien got me several times, and I was a grown up when I saw that, and I dragged my poor father to see it.
But now, when I was in the makeup for the original Freddy, I fell asleep, we were shooting nights. And I fell asleep trying to get a nap and the AD banged on the door and said, “Mr. Englund hurry up we’re going to try and get this shot before the sun comes up.†And I sat up, and I forgot, this was during the first film, forgetting I was in this make-up.
And I sat up with, you know, that kind of bad breath you have after a little nap, and I rolled off of my cot in my little tiny, you know, honey wagon dressing room. And there in the recesses, in the forced perspective of my make-up mirror, opposite my bunk, surrounded by dim light bulbs – make-up light bulbs, that had been cranked down on the dimmer. I saw this old bald man with scars and burns all over him looking back at me.
And I kind of went, “Oh geez.†And I put my hand on my head and so did he. So it became this sort of nightmarish Marx brothers routine. And it literally took me about the count of 5 or 6 to kind of come out of that semi-conscious state you’re in when you wake up real fast. And, you know, when you’re fighting for the alarm clock. That kind of moment of time. And I was very disoriented.
The point of this story is that moment, looking into the mirror, which I recovered from in 5 to 6 seconds, but that moment, I can remember it like it was yesterday. And occasionally, and I don’t want to like guilt the lily here, but occasionally that does enter into my subconscious and it does get into a dream, or it comes in as a random image that’s still stored in my brain somewhere. Because it was so disorienting.
There’s that funny distancing of where I was sitting, and then the mirror 2 or 3 feet from me. And then in an equally far back and deep in the mirror Freddy, looking back at Robert. Because I was Robert obviously.
But that really was a strange moment, and it was so early in the film experience for me, of horror films. I had been doing a lot of very normal fair up until then, except for science fiction (unintelligible). That really did disorient me, and it did stay with me, and do a little kind of a – I think there’s a definite crease in my gray matter that makes a home for that image.
I am glad that with all the scares that he has given us in The Nightmare on Elm Street Movies that it also scared him!
And check him in Lake Placid: The Final Chapter tonight on Syfy to be scared by him once again…
