Robert Englund: American Actor on his iconic role as Freddy Krueger, horrors moment in culture

Horror is having its moment. 

It’s dominating the film industry, with ‘Sinners’ recieving a record 16 nominations and four wins at this year’s Oscars – Frankenstein and Weapons getting their nods as well. 

And a man who will forever be synonymous with horror is Robert Englund – the original Freddy Krueger. 

Even though he’s long since hung up his fedora, striped sweater, and razor-fingered gloves, he’s still involved in highly influential thriller projects, including Netflix’s Stranger Things. 

“I’m so proud of Sinners for, for kind of being one of the first horror films since ‘Silence of the Lambs’, then before that, perhaps ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, to really kind of be taken seriously at its time by the academy,” he told Jack Tame.  

“I think Sinners has really begun another kind of renaissance,” Englund said. 

“I sort of thought for a minute there that maybe all the zombie projects had sort of exhausted the audience, you know, for a while, but you know, Sinners was so fresh and so wonderful.” 

Some may take a view that horror is a lower form of art, that the actors just turn up and snarl, unaware of the training many horror actors have. Englund for example, was classically trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.  

“What it does is it gives you a technique if you need it,” he explained. 

“I sometimes get parts, I can’t believe they want me for these roles ... so then you have this technique to rely on. It’s an opening.”  

Performing for stage is also quite different than performing for screen – on stage you have to exaggerate things, perform to the back of the room, whereas screen acting requires a more naturalistic performance.  

But for Freddy, he brought those elements of stage acting into his performance. 

“I didn't worry about my thinning hair, and I didn't worry about my good side or my bad side, and I was able to change my voice and I was able to move differently than Robert Englund would normally move on film because Freddy occupies this sort of surreal imagination,” Englund told Tame. 

“I don’t like to use the word dance, but I was able to physicalize him more, kind of paint him into the frame of the imagination of whoever was having a nightmare about him, and that was really liberating.” 

“Playing Freddy for all those years was actually a very liberating thing for me, and it kind of gave me a career on the other side that I know I wouldn’t normally have had because I had been established as a genre star.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks AB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Horror is dominating cinema right now. The horror genre was
the biggest winner at this year's Oscars, with the film
Sinners taking a record sixteen nominations, as well as Frankenstein
and Weapons getting their respective nods, and a man who
will forever be synonymous with the genre as the character
of Free Krueger is Robert England. Although Robert has long

(00:35):
since hung up his fedora striped sweater and razor fingered gloves,
he's still involved in hugely influential thriller and horror projects.
He's appeared in over eighty feature films and was most
recently involved in Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things. Robert is coming
to New Zealand very soon to meet his fans at
the Armageddon Expo, and he's with us this morning. Galda,

(00:55):
Good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Well, good morning Jack.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
It is great to be speaking with you ahead of
your New Zealand appearance. But I've got to start with
Halloween twenty twenty five, and it felt like, for whatever reason,
the universe had decent timing because Freddy Krueger got his
star on the Hollywood Walker Fame on the thirty first
of October.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
How was that, Well, you know, I sort of managed
that a little bit. When I was notified that I
was going to be honored, I figured I was told
the other honorees for the year, and one of them
was John Carpenter, the great director John Carpenter, and I figured, well,
naturally John Carpenter will take the Halloween date, you know,

(01:41):
because of the Halloween franchise. Well he didn't. He opted
to get his star in the spring. So I said, please, sir,
you know more Porridge, I'd be happy, happy to be
honored on Halloween because it would dovetail with thematically, with
me being a horror actor. And also, we have a

(02:04):
tradition on Hollywood Boulevard and the adjacent West Hollywood there's
a huge Halloween parade and there's huge costume cosplay, as
we call it here in the States. People dress up
and they sort of take over the streets in that
part of town. So I knew that that festival always

(02:26):
goes on for Halloween. I figured it would be great
to kind of bleed no pun, intended into that with
my ceremony.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, I think at the time you mentioned being cemented
into American popular culture. I think we can kind of
broaden it out from there. I think it can be
cemented into global popular culture. But when you look back,
was there a single moment that you realized Freddy had
escaped the movies and become something bigger?

Speaker 3 (02:54):
Well, there was a couple, you know. I saw a
Hell's Angel in November of eighty four. I was doing
a big holiday raid for my network then NBC in Hollywood.
They were the network that I had a television show on,

(03:15):
and I was promoting, still promoting this hit television series.
I had a science fiction show back then called V
for visitors, and I was at the end of the parade.
I took off my little bow tie and my suspenders
that my character wore. I was sort of this malapropping

(03:36):
benign alien, and I was getting a lot of fan mail,
and I was kind of going international with a success
from this show. And this Hell's Angel pulled up on
a Harley Davidson extended fork motorcycle and he got off,
and he took off his shirt and he pulled his

(03:56):
pants down to his knees, and he had a massive
anime styled a Japanese mafia Yak, who's a anime tattoo
of Freddie and Jason wrestling, And it went all around
his torso and down to his knees and his buttocks

(04:17):
and his back and his arms down to the elbows,
and it kind of moved with his muscles as he moved,
and I thought, my gun, I said, I'm really part
of some subculture here that I'm not that familiar with,
you know, because it was really crossing over between biker
culture and heavy metal and punk rock and tattoo and

(04:41):
goth and even as far back as then, a little
bit of anime interest, you know, because it was in
that style, you know, on this American you know, biker
and I sort of knew then. And then I was
in Europe for a nightmare, I mean, for v again
in Italy, accepting an award from my television series. And

(05:06):
I was in Milan and I literally we pulled up
in the limousine, my girlfriend and I and I opened
a door to let her out, and I was yanked
off my feet and passed over the crowd like I
was in some punk rock mosh pit, you know, in
front of La Scala, you know, the famed ancient Opera

(05:29):
House of Milan, Italy, and I and all the fans
were chanting Freddie, Freddy, Freddie. And I was there for
an entirely different project. And this was very early on
in the in the franchise history. I don't even think
we'd made part two yet, so I'm going to say
maybe early eighty five that I was there. And that

(05:53):
also made me realize that it was international and that
it had this life of its own, you know, you know,
in a foreign country. Literally, I'm not kidding. I was
jet lagged and they shut her all the all the buildings,
they shut her all the shops. So I went to
a local park at dawn. I couldn't sleep anymore. And

(06:16):
this is before I had been yanked out of the car.
But I was in this park with a zoo at down,
and well, I'll wander over and look at the zoo animals.
I'm not a big fan of zoos, but I was.
I couldn't sleep, and there were nobody in the park,
beautiful urban park in Milan, and there was no one

(06:37):
there except for the grandmothers. And the grandmothers were all
there with their grandchildren in the perambulators, in the baby carriages,
being walked, you know, giving giving the young mothers, you know,
a respite from motherhood, and the grandmother's getting up early
because old people get up early and pushing the babies

(06:57):
around the park. And the grandmothers recognized me and they
knew my name. Yeah, and I literally a couple of
them pinched my chins and said me, you know, and
they but it was they were saying, fred you know,
it's free because the Italians have a great tradition of
horror movies. They know, they're not judge thement, they're not

(07:20):
judgmental about them. They just think they're another genre like
the western, or the science fiction movie or the romantic comedy.
And that was my other inkling. You know that that
I that horror movies and science fiction projects travel. They
sort of speak that international language of film.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
You're listening to Jack Time on Newstalks, he'd be I
am speaking too. Freddy Krueger himself, Robert England is here
for the Amagidoni ex bo. You know, it feels like
horror films are going through a bit of a moment
right now. And you know, you look at the success
of the likes of Sinners and.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
You know, well, you know, I'm so proud of Sinners
for for kind of one of the first horror films
since Silence of the Lambs and then before that, perhaps
Rosemary's Baby to really kind of be taken seriously at
its time by the Academy. And I've been a member

(08:22):
of the Academy since nineteen seventy five. But it's just
great that that happens. I know that there's a sort
of feeling that the Academy does not respect comedy and
horror as much as genres. But I you know, Sinners
was such an amazing amalgam a mashup, you know, like

(08:47):
almost like a graphic novel that came alive for me.
And so many things were going on in that movie,
whether they were about either politically about race, or about
the organic nature of the growth of music and the
evolution of music in America and the influences of the

(09:08):
Irish and the black influence to music, and then and
then it's just totally mutated into a vampire film, and
I was like, okay, sign me up. And wonderful, wonderful
acting in that movie. So many terrific performances in that movie. Yeah, yeah,
So Sinners really, I think Sitters has really begun another

(09:34):
kind of renaissance. Was I sort of thought for a
minute there that maybe all the zombie projects had sort
of exhausted the audience, you know, for a while. But
you know, Sinners was so fresh and so wonderful. And
we have another one out. I don't know if it's
out in New Zealand yet, but you must see it.

(09:56):
It's called Weapons, and it's just so original and it
completely fakes you out, and it just has a gang
performance from Ed Harris's wife, Amy Madigan. She won the
Oscar this year, but you know, Amy's been around forever.
Most audiences know her from Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner,

(10:19):
but she's just rock and roll spectacular in Weapons. So
you should all check it out if you're fans of
the genre.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
It's funny, like you say, there's a bit of a renaissance,
and maybe there has been a kind of underlying sense
that some people turn their noses at horror films a
little bit. But you know, they might have assumed that
horror actors, for example, just show up and snarl. But
you trained it Rada, you did Shakespeare, So how much
of that classical background is actually in Freddy Krueger.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
Well, you know what that does for you when you're
trained as an actor like that. What it does is
it gives you technique if you need it. It gives
you help if you require it. And actors don't always
need it because sometimes you re script and you can
see yourself in that role in your mind's eye, and

(11:11):
that makes preparation a lot easier and memorization easier, and
the actual rehearsal and performance easier. But sometimes there's scenes
or there's roles we get. I sometimes get parts I
can't believe they want me, you know, for these roles,
I don't feel like I'm right for it. And this

(11:33):
goes way back, you know, this goes back to when
I was like eighteen or nineteen, and so then you
have this technique to rely on. It's an opening. It's
like a door that opens for preparation. So that's part
of it. What happened for me playing Freddy was I
had discarded a lot of my theatrical tricks, a lot

(11:57):
of stuff that I could do in the theater with
my voice and with my face and physically some of
my physics acting. I had to put that on Simmer
on camera because on camera, you know, there's a formula
there as well, right, and sometimes you want to air

(12:18):
in the direction of simplicity. But there's also that problem
of there's a little voice going off in your head going,
don't act, don't act, don't get caught acting whatever you do.
And that's really frustrating too, because when you're really allowed
to perform and really allowed to act, it's very liberating.
And when I was covered with all of that foam

(12:39):
latex and all of that medical adhesive, the glue they
used to attach it to me, and I had that
all on, I didn't worry about my thinning hair, and
I didn't worry about my good side or my bad side.
And I was able to change my voice, and I
was able to move differently than Robert England would normally

(13:00):
move on film, because Freddie occupies this sort of surreal
imagination landscape of the dream of the nightmare. You know,
in the subconscious, he's not really walking around on the streets,
and so I was able to I don't want to,
I don't like to use the word dance, but I

(13:22):
was able to physicalize him more kind of paint him
into the frame of the imagination of whoever was having
a nightmare about him, and that was really liberating. And
when I got done with the nightmare movies, I found
that when I did, and I was still doing a
lot of horror movies because by now I was established
as a horror a genre star. But what I was

(13:45):
doing the ones out of makeup, playing an old scientist,
you know, or a psychiatrist, or an old priest, or
a you know, a mad doctor or something. When when
I got those roles, the sort of vincent price roles
I was, I had been liberated from playing Freddie and

(14:05):
I found other parts of me and more courage, you know,
with accents and with my behavior on camera. So you know,
the playing Freddy for all those years was actually a
very liberating thing for me, and it kind of gave
me a career on the other side that I know

(14:26):
I wouldn't normally have had because I had been established
as a genre star.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, well, look at it is such a pleaser to speak.
We are so excited to have you in New Zealand, Robert,
travel safely and we look forward to seeing you in person.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Well, thank you so much. You know, New Zealand is
the home of a couple of my favorite actors tomorrow
Morrison and Cliff Curtis, and of course you know all
my friends and I worshiped Flight of the Concords and
all the wonderfully funny young actors on that. And I've
been to your paradise before, and I'm looking forward to

(15:01):
coming back to Auckland and maybe sneaking over on the
ferry to Davenport for an meal. Anyway, thanks for talking
with me, and I hope to see everybody at Armageddon.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
We really look forward to it. Thanks so much, Robert.
You take care and we'll see you very soon.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Thank you, Bye bye, so good.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
There's Robert England aka Freddy Krueger. He will be at
Armageddon this year. All the details will be up on
the news Talks. He'd be website for.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
More from Saturday morning with Jack Tame. Listen live to
news Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio