MOVIE NEWS – Nicolas Cage is considered one of the most thorough actors today, who prepares for every role with painstaking care. In his latest film, Renfield, he plays Count Dracula, and he doesn’t hide where he got his inspiration from.

In his previous interviews, he revealed that he watched the most important vampire films one after the other and chose the best role models for himself: Max Schreck from Nosferatu, Béla Lugosi from the American Dracula movies , and Christopher Lee among the classic English actors who played bloodsuckers. Among the modern adaptations, Cage’s uncle, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula took the prize, here Gary Oldman is phenomenal in the role of the Transylvanian count. But Anne Bancroft also proved to be an inspiration as the seductive beauty of Before the Diploma, her voice evoked the eternal manipulator for Cage. However, the actor also owes a lot to his father, August Coppola, from whom he lent his supremely impressive intelligence to the role.

Who would think that Cage‘s sources of inspiration have already been exhausted, could not be more wrong. In his latest exclusive interview with JoBló, he reveals that he was able to build a richly nuanced vampire character not only thanks to movie experiences and interpersonal relationships, but the animal world also helped him. “I wanted to emphasize the animal nature of Dracula against the state where he takes the so-called human form,” explains Cage. “When the demon takes over it, the animal breaks out of it, and it mostly reminds me of two top predators: big cats and snakes.”

The snake parallel is justified if only because Renfield‘s Dracula has several levels of teeth. At idle, vampire teeth are in place, but when their owner gets angry, they push forward, and to suck blood, they push them out completely, just like venomous snakes.

Speaking of teeth, it was also revealed that Cage was wearing vampire false teeth, but not just when he was on camera, but all the time. as long as he was on the scene, i.e. he didn’t get out of character. The false teeth were then digitally enhanced in the scenes where Dracula is released.

The protagonist of Renfield is the tormented assistant of the vampire (Nicholas Hoult), who still does not know how to escape from the oppressive control of his boss , until he meets an agile policewoman (Awkwafina), whose main goal is to eliminate the city’s biggest crime syndicate.

(Renfield – domestic release: April 13, 2023.)