Character actor David Dastmalchian has been coming into his own in recent years with key supporting roles in a variety of projects from “The Suicide Squad” to “Dune” to this weekend’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”.
He’s also got Hulu’s “Boston Strangler” coming out shortly, but one project he stars in that has various people excited is the long-gestating “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” which is finally on the way later this year.
The film takes one of the most famous chapters of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” and adapts it into its own feature story. It follows a 19th-century Russian schooner vessel transporting cargo from Carpathia to London – contents unknown to the crew.
Soon the sailors start vanishing one-by-one, killed off by the hunger of something onboard, until the ship washes up ashore in England with one raving-mad survivor.
The project hails from acclaimed Norwegian film director Andre Ovredal (“Trollhunter,” “The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), and Dastmalchian tells Collider the filmmaker goes all in on this take with a version of the Dracula story audiences haven’t really seen before:
“Horror is his [Andre’s] backbone and he is a true monster kid. He has this deep love and affinity for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as do I. His knowledge of the book and his passion for the characters is so beautiful and he’s got this really intense and unique vision and a way of telling stories that is so outside of the box.
So anyone who’s familiar with his works… you go, ‘Well, this guy never takes a little swing. He takes a big swing’. He took a huge swing with this film. I think it’s gonna scare the crap out of people, but it’s also gonna be one of those movie experiences that transports you to this other place.”
Dastmalchian is joined in the film by Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, Aisling Franciosi, Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Woody Norman, Martin Furulund, Chris Walley and 6’7 actor Javier Botet as Dracula.
Zak Olkewicz (“Fear Street”) penned the script for the project which hits cinemas on August 11th.
