Robert Englund on Kinky Freddy Krueger Fans, Real Nightmares, Speedos at Stanford | Page 2 | Revolver

Robert Englund on Kinky Freddy Krueger Fans, Real Nightmares, Speedos at Stanford

Iconic horror actor reveals how Freddy still haunts his dreams
freddy krueger ALAMY STOCK, Album/Alamy Stock Photo
Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger
photograph by Album/Alamy Stock Photo

Growing up in southern California, Robert Englund played sports and watched movies. "My friends and I would gang up on somebody's mom to drive us in an old wooden station wagon down to the Saturday matinee," the 71-year-old actor fondly recalls. He especially loved horror films: "I got obsessed with Forbidden Planet and Them! and Creature From the Black Lagoon." It was only later, when he was trying to establish himself as a serious artist in plays by Beckett and Shakespeare, that he blocked out that period in his life. "I somehow suppressed that," he confesses about his childhood obsession with horror. "I was embarrassed by it, and I didn't admit to it. And then Wes Craven taught me to respect the genre."

Craven, of course, was the mastermind behind 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, which introduced filmgoers to Freddy Krueger and made Englund a movie star. Englund has done other fine work — he was part of the 1980s NBC series V — but that iconic Nightmare nemesis remains his legacy. And it's a legacy that keeps adding new chapters: After more than a decade away from the character, Englund appeared last year on a Halloween-themed episode of ABC's The Goldbergs as the fearsome Freddy. For horror fans, the cameo was a welcome return for everybody's favorite sweater-rocking villain — but for Englund, it also meant acknowledging how the Nightmare movies have impacted generations of viewers. To his shock, they've become family films. As Englund puts it, "The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is a sort of extended It's a Wonderful Life for Halloween fans."

Because the franchise delivered its frights while its characters slept, we wanted to talk to Englund about his own dreams and nightmares — and what it's like to be personally responsible for strangers' night terrors.

robertenglund_credit_simonwebb.jpg, Simon Webb
Robert Englund
photograph by Simon Webb

FOR THE GOLDBERGS, YOU REPRISED FREDDY FOR THE FIRST TIME ON SCREEN SINCE 2005. HOW DID THAT COME TOGETHER?
ROBERT ENGLUND I got a really beautiful long email from Adam Goldberg [the creator of The Goldbergs] talking about how he pulls all his episodes from memories as a kid growing up in the Eighties, and that he snuck next door to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.

Wes Craven was so talented and smart, and those movies are so original, [but back then] I was having to defend them against the PTA and critics and people that were worried about gore and violence and horror and Satanism and everything else. But what I never calculated is that that was also the beginning of the video revolution. Maybe the last five-to-eight years, I've had [adult] fans come up to me specifically and tell me these stories about being allowed to go to the mom-and-pop video store, and then later Blockbuster, with mom or dad — or mom and dad together, or an older brother, or a cool stepfather — and they'd get to choose one of the movies for the family to watch. Fans tell me these memories they have of a father who's gone now or a mother who's passed away. Their nostalgia is palpable: Some of the most intimate evenings [they had as kids] was with the afghan blanket across their lap and a fire in the fireplace while watching one of the Nightmare films. I never thought of Nightmare on Elm Street as a family experience.

LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT FREDDY. DO YOU?
The only one I have goes right back to shooting the original Nightmare. In about the second or third week of shooting, we were somewhere in Hollywood on a side street. It was probably four in the morning, and we were shooting all night, and I had some time off.

I did not have a star wagon yet — I was in a honey wagon, a little narrow cubbyhole of a dressing room with a little cot on one wall and a makeup mirror on the other with light bulbs around it. I had dimmed the light bulbs, and I'd stretched out on my little minuscule cot with my big Freddy boots and my makeup completely intact. I had just dozed off when I heard a knock on the door: "Mr. Englund! Mr. Englund! We're gonna try to get this take!" I sat up in that kind of semi-consciousness that you are when you're asleep, and I looked in the forced perspective of the makeup mirror, with the dimmed-down bulbs around it, and I saw this bald, old, disfigured man looking back at me. I jumped! I had forgotten that I was in makeup.

The reflection of the disfigured Freddy Krueger in this wall-length mirror seared itself into my memory. That moment of disorientation comes back to me in dreams. I dream of that moment I see Freddy, diminished in the dark of the mirror, looking back at me.

FREDDY IS SO UBIQUITOUS IN THE CULTURE ...
Yeah, there's an Elmo Freddy, a Peanuts Freddy, a Hello Kitty Freddy. There's girls dressing now as Sexy Freddy with scratches on their face, like they got a little too close to him in their dreams, trick-or-treating all over America and Europe.

SO HOW DOES THAT FEEL FOR YOU? DO YOU FEEL ANY SENSE OF OWNERSHIP OVER FREDDY? OR DO YOU HAVE TO LET THAT GO?
One of the reasons I said yes to The Goldbergs was it's kind of a moment of surrender for me. I've been very protective of the character for a long time — and if anybody should be allowed to have fun with him, it's me. I don't own the character, so I have to ask permission if I'm going to exploit the character. But I don't feel ownership — I felt protective of the character for a while.

But I grew up going to movies, and I've always been partial to Hollywood lore, and I understand that every movie that our grandparents watched was a remake of a silent film. I've seen it happen before: In the Sixties, I remember the nasty Mickey Mouse T-shirts — Mickey Mouse doggy-style with Minnie Mouse and things like that — so this isn't something that really surprised me.

I had to surrender to the fact that [Freddy] will be the lead sentence in my obituary. I've done an awful lot of stuff but, you know, my pairing with Freddy Krueger will follow me to my grave. I made peace with that a long time ago.

2.jpg, RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
Englund in makeup for 'A Nightmare on Elm Street,' 1984
photograph by RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

WHEN FANS COME UP AND TELL YOU ABOUT THEIR FREDDY NIGHTMARES, WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT'S THE IMPULSE FOR THEM?
I think they need to share it because I think a lot of them are recurring dreams. That's a compelling thing — and then they meet me in the flesh and it's a little bit of an antidote to that recurring dream. I think some enjoy [telling me], and I think for some of them … your subconscious is a very viable part of who you are and what you are. And then you meet the person who's invaded your subconscious for 20 or 30 years, that's kind of remarkable.

Sometimes, it's a little obsessive what they share. Sometimes it's so detailed and meaningful to them, but it's very oblique to me — I don't know those details, which are very important details to them.

And then sometimes it's flirting. There are goth girls all around the world — I've had this happen to me in Sweden, in Germany, in the U.K. and the States. They start to tell me [their Freddy dreams], and it's very sexual — very, very sexual. There's a sexual component — a beauty-and-the-beast fascination — with the glove as an extension of a kind of S&M or rock & roll fantasy. So that's an interesting one to get because it's almost always in a public situation. It's not terribly embarrassing, but I always wonder, Well, people are eavesdropping on this fantasy that this girl is sharing with me — what do I say? I don't want to be the creepy old guy, so I have to have the right answer. A lot of times I say, "Well, yeah, there must be a real signifier with the glove. I don't know what it means — I mean, we could talk to Mr. Freud about it."

THERE'S ANOTHER DEFINITION FOR "DREAM," OF COURSE: SOMETHING THAT YOU HOPE HAPPENS OR SOMETHING YOU ASPIRE TO BE. AS A KID, WHAT WAS YOUR DREAM? WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU WANTED TO DO WHEN YOU GREW UP?
I paid lip service as a precocious child to the fact that I was gonna be a lawyer. I was accepted at Stanford, but I didn't go. I was sort of like half-actor and then, on the other side, I was a jock — I was a gymnast and a championship swimmer and a surfer. When I was invited up to tour Stanford University, I went up with my parents and we were walking around the campus, and all the frat boys were lying out in front of the frat house on the lawn with Speedos on, sunbathing.

Now, I'm no stranger to Speedos — I was a swimming champion — but as a surfer, Speedos were verboten. We wore baggies or surf trunks, board shorts. As a Southern California surfer, that was creepy. I don't know whether it was homophobic — and I apologize for that if it was — but I said, "No, I don't wanna go to Stanford. I wanna go to UCLA. I wanna be an actor."

I left home right around high school graduation — my father and I had a fight, and I jumped on the back of a motorcycle and went to Hollywood with a buddy. That night, I saw Buffalo Springfield and Sonny & Cher who were called Caesar & Cleo then. I smoked a joint and moved into the basement of a theater. For the next seven years or so, I was a theater actor.

3.jpg, Tony Bock/Toronto Star Via Getty Images
Robert Englund on the set of 'A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master,' 1988
photograph by Tony Bock/Toronto Star Via Getty Images

IT MUST BE WEIRD TO SIGN UP FOR A ROLE LIKE FREDDY, HAVING NO IDEA WHERE IT MIGHT LEAD — OR THAT IT MIGHT BE THE THING THAT MAKES YOUR CAREER.
I still flog myself over auditions that I screwed up 50 years ago. I almost was on Kojak. Who would I have been if I'd have been the stool pigeon on Kojak? [The producers] made it into a cop friend of Kojak's, but at one time he was [just] gonna be this street kid that Kojak went to for information. I was right down to the wire on that — I was pretty young, and they thought I was too young, and they decided they needed that character in the police department with Telly Savalas, so I didn't get that. But I often wonder, Who would I have been had I been that guy? I was right down to the wire for The Last Detail — Randy Quaid got the role, but it was with Jack Nicholson. What if my career would've taken that direction? I turned down a role on the TV show Hunter, a recurring role — I didn't think that show would last, and it went 10 years! Would I be some guy who just had his house burn down in [the] Malibu [forest fires] who nobody remembers? It's real strange, the things about a career.

BECAUSE OF THE NIGHTMARE MOVIES, HAVE YOU BECOME SOMEBODY WHO'S REALLY INTERESTED IN THE SUBCONSCIOUS? HAVE YOU STUDIED ANY OF THAT?
I was only at UCLA for the blink of an eye, but one class I audited there was on dream analysis, just purely coincidentally. I remember one lecture, and the guy said that the brain is like ... you know the cubbyholes in the old-fashioned post office? Where you throw the letters? You have all of these random images and thoughts that sear themselves into your subconscious — into your brain — and you have to sort them out, and that's what sleep does.

Freddy Krueger_Credit_AF Archive-Alamy Stock Photo.jpg, AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
film still from 'Freddy vs. Jason,' 2003
photograph by AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

There's that famous [scenario] of seeing a girl at a crosswalk — or you bumping into a girl coming around the corner of a building in school and dropping your books, and both of you rising up together and bumping foreheads, like, a meet-cute in a bad comedy. I've had those experiences happen to me, and I've dreamt about them my entire life. I've dreamt about a girl at a crosswalk. I dreamt about her a week ago. And that was probably ... that was at Melrose and Highland in the Seventies. That girl at the crosswalk with the wind hitting her hair, just for a second ... that moment seared itself into some part of my cerebral cortex. It's still sorting itself out with other images like that that were strong impulses visually, and they're with you forever.

I think there's a lot of historic stuff stuck back in our subconscious that we pull out, and it pairs up very surreally and very strangely with more recent images or storylines that affect our imagination. It's so complicated. We have to sort those images out — they have to be stored somewhere — and a lot of times, they find themselves becoming the fodder for our dreams and our nightmares.