Next month, Renfield, a new film starring Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage, will hit the big screen.
In Bram Stoker's original novel, Renfield is Dracula's devoted and mysterious servant, who resides in Dr John Seward's mental asylum as a fly-eating 'lunatic'. However, Universal's upcoming horror-comedy adaptation is set to bring new focus onto the vampire's infamous henchman, as he works to escape from the clutches of his over-demanding boss to finally live his own life, void of blood-thirsty errands.
In a recent Ask-Me-Anything session on Reddit, Cage revealed that during the making of the movie, he accidentally drank his own blood.
Although it was revealed to Insider that the actor would frequently stay in character between takes, his blood-consummation wasn't actually a result of method acting.
In fact, during the Reddit discussion, Cage clarifies that it was actually caused by his particularly sharp fangs penetrating his skin.
"No reason in terms of method", he says, "but the fangs were genuine fangs, they were ceramic and quite pointy. So I did bite my lip a few times which made me drink my own blood."
On what influenced his own incarnation of the legendary character, Cage says: "Well, I had a lot of help. There were a ton of super-talented people on that movie that helped design the look. We wanted it to be more homage, more Christopher Lee.
"I favoured Christopher Lee as Dracula and I liked his kind of sixties hairdo, but the wardrobe, the costume, and no, I didn't come up with the idea for the rings. That all came out of a wardrobe. They came in with all that. Maybe they sent something in me that I would like that, but that was really their contribution. [The voice] is kind of an amalgamation of a sort mid-Atlantic August Coppola accent combined with some Christopher Lee, with some Anne Bancroft thrown in for good measure.”
Cage previously spoke of his kinship for Christopher Lee's Dracula while in conversation with Collider, offering: "My personal favourite? You know, in terms of Dracula on camera, my favourite image of the Dracula character is Christopher Lee."
Speaking of his favourite Dracula movie, Cage hails the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1992.
"In terms of a movie that really got into the pathos and the psyche of Dracula, you know it’s Coppola, it’s gotta be Coppola" he explains. "I told Francis, ‘Every frame of your movie is a work of art.’ It’s a beautiful movie, and Gary [Oldman] is one of my favourite actors, but that’s not what this is.
"This is more of a – I call it more of a pop art because I don’t have the time to delve into the psyche of Dracula’s love and exile or Dracula as a lonely, supernatural force of unrequited love. I mean, it’s not this movie, this movie is very much a comedy, and I have to, within a finite amount of a few selected scenes, bring something that has a pop."
Renfield will arrive on April 14. Watch the trailer below:
