If horror legend Robert Englund is going to terrorize people in their dreams armed with a razor glove, it’ll be for his own personal reasons and not for a future Nightmare on Elm Street outing.
Chatting with Entertainment Weekly, Englund expressed his comfortability with how the franchise “ended” with Freddy vs. Jason and offers a practical reason why you won’t see him don Freddy’s sweater in a future sequel or reboot.
“I’m too old to do another Freddy now,” he explained to EW. “If I do a fight scene now it’s got to be real minimal because I can’t snap my head for eight different takes and different angles. My spine gets sore. I can still be mean and scary, but I’m mostly relegated now to sort of Van Helsing roles, old doctors and sh*t. So it’s fun that the last moment of me ever playing Freddy is a wink to the audience.”
Englund’s not feeling particularly down about aging out of that brand of performance. He considers playing the iconic villain for an extended period to be a happy experience.
“It’s like, I had a good run, I had a good time,” he said. “And no one plans for this in your career. When I was wearing tights and doing Shakespeare, I didn’t say I wanted to be famous for playing this boogeyman. Careers happen and one of the pieces of advice I give to people is I’m sure you’ll do a great pilot or you’ll do a little independent art movie and it won’t go anywhere and then you might do your Intern No. 3 on Grey’s Anatomy and that’s the one that becomes the huge hit. People just don’t know. And when you’ve survived as long as I have and you see that, you can be real happy that you got 20 years as Freddy Krueger, you know?”
You wouldn’t guess the legacy of a horrifically burnt child murderer could be morphed into something inspiring, but here we are. If nothing else, Nightmare obsessives have no shortage of sequels to dig though and the warm memory of that non-existent It cameo.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
