Nicolas Cage Really Sunk His Teeth Into Dracula In ‘Renfield’

Nicolas Cage was born to play Dracula.

“His father played the movie Nosferatu for him when he was five years old,” explained Renfield director Chris McKay. “I think that vampires and gothic films and silent movie acting were indelibly imprinted on him when he was really young.”

The movie stars Cage as the iconic vampire but puts his titular manservant, played by Nicholas Hoult, front and center as he considers a new life away from his Master’s clutches. The last time Cage and Hoult starred together on screen was as father and son in 2005’s The Weather Man. Renfield lands in theaters on Friday, April 14, 2023.

McKay confirmed that Cage is a big fan of legendary actor Christopher Lee, the actor responsible for one of the most iconic portrayals of Dracula, adding that “he sort of looks like him a bit.”

“He looked like a weird combination of Lee and Bela Lugosi when he put up the makeup, the hair, and the costume on. I was shocked at how similar he looked,” the director enthused. “He also brings a lot of humanity and nuance to what Dracula is going through and these honest emotional reactions to Renfield.”

Cage brought a lot of his own ideas to the table.

“Nic has a pet crow, and I think at one point he wanted to know if he could have it in the movie,” McKay recalled. “I think that’s probably the most outrageous thing he asked, but he was incredibly respectful.”

The filmmaker knew how committed the actor was early on in the process, saying that Cage was “off book” the second time he met with him.

“He knew all the long speeches and everything,” McKay confirmed. “Nic could recite it, and he had a voice inspired by his father’s. He was a literature professor, an intellectual, and a writer with a Mid-Atlantic accent he wanted to speak with.”

The actor also informed several of the film’s costume choices, down to Dracula’s rings. “I think some of the fabrics, the velvet, and the rhinestones, because he loved the idea of being a rock and roll Dracula, this guy who had delusions of grandeur and was an incredible narcissist who liked the finer things and wanted to feel decadent,” McKay revealed.

A wide range of movies influenced the director’s vision.

“Even if Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a funny movie and a good movie, Leslie Nielsen as Dracula and Peter MacNicol as Renfield are a lot of fun, but I didn’t necessarily want this movie to be a straight parody like that,” he expounded. “In my mind, to do a horror comedy right, there have got to be some real stakes in it, some moments of fear or suspense. Sam Raimi was a big influence on me, so Evil Dead II was certainly in there. Peter Jackson’s early movies like Dead Alive, or Braindead as some people know it, was a big influence, as were An American Werewolf in London and Shaun of the Dead. Those are big touchstone movies for me.”

Renfield is also riddled with homages to the vampire genre, including director Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula. McKay did play with the idea of taking that further, saying he would have “loved to play with some more of that real estate” early in the movie but ultimately opted to keep it lean.

“I would have connected the audience to the good times between Renfield and Dracula a little bit more and showed them through the years, progressing to the place that they get to,” the filmmaker explained. “I wanted audiences to feel like these guys had a real relationship, so I would have done a 70s Hammer thing, a little more of the Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing vibe, maybe something in the 80s or 90s with a film like Dracula 2000. It was important to me because I wanted to connect to the past somehow, so we used the Tod Browning movie.”

He hasn’t abandoned the idea and would love to explore it if a sequel got the green light.

“I’d love to make another movie with Cage and Hoult and these characters because they are so much fun to work with,” McKay confirmed. “Between the two of them, I think there’s a lot more we could do. Having this kind of tone for the Universal Monsters seems like a world you could have a lot more fun with. If this is a success, I’d love to be able to do that.”

Something the director experimented with but ultimately cut from the movie was a dance sequence.

“In the finished movie, after Nicholas Hoult’s character, Renfield, leaves the restaurant with Awkwafina’s character, Rebecca, Dracula interrupts them,” the director described. “In the original version, Renfield walks out, there’s music playing in the background and a voiceover, and people are celebrating and thanking him for saving the day. As he bursts out the door, the music starts to come in a little bit more, and then he goes into a full-blown dance sequence in an alley with about 30 dancers.”

“We had dancing maggots and flies and breakdancing cockroaches, and it was a whole big thing, then it reaches a crescendo and ends with Dracula interrupting them and saying to Renfield that he needs to talk to him right away.”

McKay explained that the sequence, some of which was included in test screenings, was removed because it “felt like a double beat” as there was another musical montage in the movie, and it felt like “a hat on a hat.” However, he called Hoult “an amazing dancer.”

Renfield’s highly creative end credits sequence was another opportunity for McKay to get creative and showcase a plethora of ideas they tried while creating the film’s look and feel.

“Some of the stuff we didn’t have room for in the movie, but there were things that we shot on the camera tests and really liked,” he explained. “A lot of times with that stuff, it’s a plain black or neutral background, but I wanted the camera test to feel more like the movie, so I had Coppola’s Dracula theme playing, and Alec Hammond, the production designer, built this little set there with candles, some props and set dressing and we used that.”

“Cage also looked a bit different because we were perfecting the look. The hair was a little longer and had these wings at the back, and the make-up and outfits weren’t quite right, but it still looked good, and I wanted to share that.”

McKay concluded, “It made the credits more interesting and fun and hopefully makes people want to stay and watch and see all the other people who worked on this. I think that’s really cool.”