Jackie Earle Haley discusses Freddy role

Last year, Slash Film were lucky enough to get an on-set pass to the Nightmare On Elm Street remake.

Now, we’re still trying to figure out if this will be a trick or a treat (remake bad, concept still awesome). But the website got some pretty natty stuff out of the man behind the burns, Jackie Earle Haley, stepping in to update Robert Englund’s original scarface.

Chatting with the actor just after he'd spent four hours in the make-up chair being applied with fake burns, Slash Film cornered Haley for details about this Freddy rethink.

“It’s probably a little darker, a little more seriousness,” Haley says of his portrayal. “There’s some of that gleefulness, but it’s probably a little more serious. A little more pissed.”

The Watchmen star goes on to state that he was a fan of the original film (“I saw the first one in the theatre and I dug it”), which he re-watched prior to filming, before going on to discuss the practicalities of all those prosthetics.

“It’s pretty encumbering,” he says. “All of this stuff is just glued, from here all the way to the back, every square inch of my back has got appliances glued to it.

“It feels like crap when you’re sitting around, but it’s kind of oddly motivating for the character between action and cut because it’s just such a weird feeling. You know, I’ve got fake fingertips over here and the glove over here.

“I’ve got a cloudy contact and I can’t see out of this eye at all and this one’s bloody and I can kind of see out of it and of course I don’t have my glasses so the whole experience is just this weird thing, but it oddly helps for Freddy once we’re moving.”

If this remake turns out to be a success, Haley’s already signed on for “a few of them”, which he thinks "could be great”. Guess we'll find out when the flick opens here on 7 May.

Read the full interview at Slash Film here.

Intrigued by this, or think it’ll be a nightmare on celluloid?