Colin Farrell: "Fright Night"'s Sexy Vamp Next Door

Handsome actor Colin Farrell is not the guy you might picture playing a vampire in the re-boot of 1980’s genre fave Fright Night but once you see him in his wife-beater tee and evil make up, you’re convinced…bigtime!

We’re sitting down with Colin who is wearing his usual casual uniform; partially buttoned dress shirt and jeans. The actor obviously had a blast playing Jerry, the ancient vampire who moves into Spielberg-like suburbia to terrorize the neighbors and turn them into his willing army. It’s up to teens Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots, along with a reluctant, Criss Angel-like Vegas magician played wonderfully by the last “Dr. Who”, David Tennant, to stop him.

TeenHollywood: What was it like going from the comedy of Horrible Bosses to horror guy in Fright Night?

Colin: Fun! It was fun. Both were flick-a-switch characters. They were so extremely different from who I am. It was like there were these shadows created and it was step into the shadow and out of it and go home. I didn’t end up bringing the work home because there wasn’t as much emotional resonance.

The parts that are much more dramatic are the parts that tend to echo into the evening and night and into your sleep. Horrible Bosses was only a five day shoot; a condensed period of childhood make-believe. I wanted to mix it up. So it was time to go have a laugh with both these films. 

TeenHollywood: How do you get in the mindset of Jerry the vampire; a character who isn’t human and really doesn’t want to be human?

Colin: Yeah, he had no desire to. It was trying to imagine a world where you are completely severed from your basic human virtues and characteristics like fear, remorse, compassion, hope, love. All those ideas were things that Jerry understood objectively, having been a human once, but knew more about, being an observer of human behavior over a matter of centuries.

It really was committing to the idea that this was a vampire who had no human feelings at all. If anything, he had disdain for human beings. That, inevitably, brings him down. In some ways it was liberating to play that and, in another sense, it almost got repetitive at times. Without these human things that we’re used to pulling and pushing inside us, it ran the risk of being one note and I hoped it wasn’t that.

TeenHollywood: I don’t think you had ever been in a role where you had to wear prosthetics, contacts or vampire teeth like that.  Did all that help you get into the role or were you more like “just hurry and get this off of me”?

Colin: [laughs] Yeah, it really helped my performance..  (yelling) “Craig!! Where’s Craig (Gillespie, the director)? Get this f-ing stuff off!”. No, it really did help. I’m a sucker for all things practical (on set, rather than CGI), I really am. I’m doing a film now (the re-make of Total Recall) and there’s a lot of green screen in it but the green screen is forty yards away in the background to create this world of incredible grandiosity and detail. But, the world I’m in, forty yards in front of it, is a practical set that’s been built by amazing craftsmen so it’s not like I’m working with a tennis ball as Jar-Jar-Binks or anything [we laugh].

There was some CGI done on Fright Night but any time the practical make-up was on, it really does help me and it’s kind of like mask work as well. It kind of liberates you, in a really scary way as well. It’s very powerful when you put something over your face and you just have your eyes to work with.

TeenHollywood: And then I guess you looked at yourself in the mirror and freaked out?

Colin: Yeah. And it really does affect how you move, instantly. There is some connection. Some synapse goes off in your head and you begin to react and behave in a certain way. Maybe you just go with it or alter it from there. It was fun. It really was.

TeenHollywood: Were you a big vampire movie fan growing up?

Colin: There were so many vampire films I saw as a kid. This (the first Fright Night) I loved this, The Lost Boys, Near Dark, many incarnations of Dracula and Coppola’s Dracula with Gary Oldman, Interview with the Vampire. They were all in my collective imagination and informed, in some way, what I did with Jerry.

TeenHollywood: Did you put in any little touches for Jerry that weren’t in the script?

Colin: The apple (vampire Jerry munches one). I was supposed to come back home and Charley (played by Anton Yelchin) sneaks into the house and I’m carrying a bag of groceries and I was “What?” I had this image of Jerry the vampire bringing home a quart of milk and sliced bread. There was an apple in the original and I thought this would be a good place for it.

TeenHollywood: What was it like working with Imogen Poots or the other actors in general?

Colin: Imogen is a wonderful actress and a great lady and it was fun working with her. It was a lot of fun to shoot. It felt like a tightknit collection of film fans who were getting a chance to play out some wish fulfillment. We were all engaged with the story. Everyone got into their backstory. You can just go to town on it. Jerry was in Versailles and maybe got drunk with Hemmingway once. He lived in China. He’s 400 years old. Some Mediterranean vampire clan. On and on.

At the end of the day everyone had a firm understanding of what they were doing. I was the horror. Anton and Immie were the emotional core. Chris (Mintz-Plasse) and David (Tennant) were the comedy. We all got on set and had a blast bouncing off each other and kept it loose and varied the takes.  I had to watch not slipping into a Transylvanian accent because I’m a film fan (in Drac accent) “Whohahahah, Count Dra-coo-la”.

TeenHollywood: Okay, we’re freaked.