After wrapping production this past April in Louisiana, Universal Pictures’ highly anticipated horror-comedy Renfield is getting ready for its forthcoming release and according to one of the film’s stars, Brandon Scott Jones, the portrayal of Dracula by Nicolas Cage is going to be “legit creepy.” Featuring Cage and Nicholas Hoult as the vampire’s fervent henchman Renfield, the Chris McKay film will follow the “toxic and co-dependent relationship” between the pair made famous by Bram Stoker as they navigate life in a modern-day setting.
While talking about his Netflix movie and the CBS smash hit sitcom Ghosts, Jones revealed that while he can’t share too much about the top-secret project also co-starring Ben Schwartz, Awkwafina and Shohreh Aghdashloo, he is optimistic fans will be very excited about the spring 2023 release. “When I was on set and we were there when we were filming, Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult are so good in this movie — they’re going to be so, so dynamic together,” Jones told PopCulture last month. “Honestly, Nicolas Cage’s Dracula is legit creepy, and I’m really pumped for it. I think it’ll be really, really, really, really fun. I wish I could say anything more about it, but I’m not too sure what I’m allowed to say.”
Expected to hit theaters on April 14, 2023 and “worth the wait” according to Jones, Renfield is a character, first introduced in Stoker’s 1897 epistolary novel Dracula, who is obsessed with drinking blood in order to achieve immortality. In the modern retelling, audiences will meet him as a patient in an asylum who teams up with another character to take down his master Dracula — the blood-sucking vampire who dangles his assistant’s everlasting life before him. With the film serving as a breakup movie, it also injects plenty of comedy thanks to its ensemble cast.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Schwartz previously spoke to The Playlist, admitting he was feeling pretty good about the film’s release. Though not much is known about the roles played by the ensemble cast, Schwartz is said to play a character named Teddy Lobo, a mobster who is somehow tied to the titular sidekick and Cage’s Dracula. The performance was one that left Schwartz in awe as well. “People don’t even know. There’s so much more — there’s so much more Nic Cage that you haven’t seen,” he said. “Nic Cage was a dream and lovely to work with. When I was doing scenes with him, he was great, totally committed, and 100% in it and you’re just in awe.”
The film, which Cage compares to American Werewolf in London and other similar projects, admitted to Variety how he wanted to make a “super fun” project that was also a comedy. “I want it to pop in a unique way from how we’ve seen it played,” the actor told Variety, sharing how he brought the character to life and through a new dimensional lens. “I saw Malignant and I thought what she did with those moves — and even Ringu with Sadako [Yamamura] … I want to look at what we can explore with this movement and voice.” Sharing how it is all about “tone,” Cage called the movie a “blast” to work on.
