For a man stepping into the shoes of a serial killer, Jackie Earle Haley seems about as kind as they come. At Monday’s press conference for Platinum Dunes’ new re-boot of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ Haley, soft-spoken and beyond polite, spoke about his reasons for taking on the role of such an iconic monster, and the challenges it presented.
“I’m not a big horror genre fan,” he admits. “When I saw the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ trailer in the mid-eighties, I went to see this one in the movie theater, ‘cause it kind of turned me on, kind of like a paranormal concept to it, in terms of the whole dreamscape, and I dug it. It was different.” Out of the glut of 1980’s slasher films, Haley said ‘Nightmare’ was the only one he found intriguing. “I always thought it was developed better, it was more multi-dimensional not only in the monster but also the rest of the characters.” Though perhaps not multi-dimensional enough to inspire Haley to watch the other eight films in the ‘Nightmare’ canon. After the first, he says, he wasn’t a follower of the series.
Like many child actors, Haley’s career stalled out after he hit adolescence, yet he’s had one of the most surprising second acts of modern cinema, most recently turning in an electrifying single-scene appearance in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Shutter Island,’ and a movie-making turn as Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s ‘Watchmen.’ But it was his Oscar-nominated performance as suburban child molester Ronnie McGorvey in 2006’s ‘Little Children’ that put Haley back in the spotlight. When asked whether Haley feared that between Ronnie and Freddy Krueger he was becoming something of a poster boy for child molestation, he responds seriously:
“There was a big pause for thought on that… But at the same time, this was Freddy Krueger. When I was considering this, this voice in my head kept saying ‘how can you not play Freddy Krueger?!’ And I think the reason why I was able to embrace this was, what I embraced was the boogeyman… It’s a different genre, a different world… In (‘Little Children,’) I was truly trying to examine the human condition in a thought provoking drama and in this I was just truly embracing the boogeyman in a campfire story.” He adds, “I have a feeling most of the people that see this will have never seen and never will see ‘Little Children.’”
At the very least, it’s possible that if there is some audience cross-over, viewers of ‘Little Children’ might not recognize Haley in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street.’ As Freddy, his makeup job is perhaps the highlight of the film. It’s more elaborate, and more realistic, than ever before. But getting into makeup every day was, well, a nightmare. “It’s like the most cumbersome, arduous stuff I’ve ever dealt with,” Haley remarks. “I remember sitting there thinking that it’s gotta be better going to the dentist. And since then I’ve been to the dentist, and I was right.”
On top of the facial makeup, Haley was saddled with false fingertips and painful contact lenses, which proved enough to make even a nice guy like him rather irritable “It took me awhile to get my political filters back in place,” he admits. “The best thing to do was just kind of sit somewhere and wait, and it was kind of an otherwordly feeling… I would just give all that to Freddy between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’”
Much of the time on set, Haley was forced to wear a cloak over his costume, to protect the secrecy of the new, redesigned Freddy. Rooney Mara, who plays the film’s heroine Nancy Holbrook, says the combined effect of cloak and makeup made Haley almost impossibly creepy to be around. Co-star Thomas Dekker, however, walked right up to him the first time the cloak came off. “I’m such a fan of all the original films and knew the original Freddy look so well, that all I was doing was really checking it out and seeing all the differences and how vastly different the makeup was,” he says. “And I think for me when I first saw (it,) it was kind of a good indicator of what this movie was going to be, as far as the makeup spoke of what you were going to do with the character and how it was a shift in tone from the original movies.”
This tone shift extended past Freddy to the teen dreamers themselves, particularly Nancy, whose own back-story in this new film is closely tied to Freddy’s own. “Our Nancy is much darker, and she’s disturbed and trying to figure out why she is the way she is,” says Mara. “I think because she’s been through so much, she has so much built up in her and then when she finds out what happened, how can you not have so much rage, and so much strength?”
Of course, the more things change in slasher cinema, the more they stay the same, and Mara, as Freddy’s prime target, had to go through some gruelling punishment on-set herself. One day, on which she was forced to repeatedly wade through a hallway of blood-red goo, stands out as a low-point. “It was the longest day of my life,” Mara says, adding that she actually fainted towards day’s end. When asked if she knows what was in the goo, she responds, “I know it was edible...” And after a pause, “I didn’t ask for the recipe.”
