Dracula is a character with a huge cultural legacy, with actors from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman – and now Nicolas Cage in Renfield – taking on the role. The same, however, can't be said for R.M. Renfield, Dracula's familiar. Nicholas Hoult takes on the role in the new movie of the same name, a horror-comedy that sees the vampire's lackey empowering himself to step away from the toxic relationship with his bloodsucking master.
"Obviously, with Dracula, people then have such an idea of who he is on screen and their interpretation of their favorites. Whereas with Renfield, he hasn't appeared in every Dracula movie, and he was more of a secondary character when he has, so I probably did feel a sense of freedom through that," Hoult tells the Inside Total Film podcast when we sit down to discuss the movie.
"But there was also this really nice rooting in the novel and being able to go back and read that and learn about that Renfield, but then go through and watch Dwight Frye and Tom Waits and Peter MacNicol and go, 'Okay, what do I like about their performances? What can I steal?'"
Frye played Renfield in the 1931 movie Dracula, opposite Lugosi's vampiric count (a film that we see a snippet of at the start of Renfield), while Waits played the role in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula in 1992, and MacNicol took on the character in Mel Brooks' 1995 parody, Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
"For instance, Dwight Frye's laugh, I was like, 'Oh, this is such an iconic, brilliant laugh. I feel like that would be great to kind of pepper in or have a little taste of occasionally,'" Hoult continued. "But this story is taking place 100 years later, and the crazed fervor of Renfield working for Dracula in those movies and what he is there has waned a lot and it's settled into this morally ambiguous, conflicted character, who is doing his best but just doesn't believe in himself or where he's ended up, and lives with a lot of regret."
For more from the full conversation with Hoult, check out the latest episode of the Inside Total Film podcast, available on:
Renfield arrives in cinemas on April 14. For more viewing inspiration, check out our guide to this year's most highly anticipated movie release dates.
