Set Report Part 2: Talking With the Cast of Dracula Untold

When Shock Till You Drop visited the set of Dracula Untold in Belfast, Ireland in the fall of 2013, we spoke to the three actors driving the film’s dramatic themes: Luke Evans as Vlad Tepes, Sarah Gadon as his wife Mirena and Dominic Cooper as Mehmet II.

Here, you’ll find highlights of our conversation with this trio.

If you missed out on part one of our set report – I delve into the origins of the project and take you on a tour of the set and art department here.


 LUKE EVANS – “VLAD TEPES”

On the difference between Vlad/pre-Dracula and post “transformation”: You meet Vlad at the beginning of the film and he’s in a good place.  He’s had 10 years of peace.  He’s in a loving relationship with his beautiful wife and he has a good kid, and his people are happy and everything is prosperous, so he’s quite in a good place.  And then, the threat comes of an invasion by the Ottoman Empire and Mehmet, he loses his security and he becomes quite vulnerable, and you see the cracks start to show and the weaknesses. And you see that he’s a very vulnerable leader.  Then, he gains this gift in a way of these powers that he has after he chooses to become a vampire and you see a different character. He becomes more confident…he has hope all of a sudden in a different way.  He also has these abilities, which he didn’t have before which no one else knows about, but he’s aware he can do these things and he can speak to you without opening his mouth and you can hear what he’s saying and all those things, and he can fly and jump, he’s immortal and his wounds heal, and all the stuff.  I think that sort of stuff is good to play on.  As we go further into the film, I get to play those internal confidence-boosting moments.  I think there’s a lot of Vlad that you see at the beginning that you see at the end. The important thing we wanted to impress in the character of Vlad and Dracula, when he becomes the vampire, is you see the human in the vampire. We don’t want to disassociate the two people. We want to keep them the same person, the same emotional drive he has at the beginning of the film and the reasons why he does what he does are still prevalent at the end of the film.  So, in a way, he’s the same person, but in a way he isn’t and he has other things going on. As much as he has this urge to drink the blood of a human, he really resists as much as he can because of the love for his first wife and his family and his kid and his people.

His transformation takes time: The transformation… He doesn’t realize the powers immediately that he has. It’s sort of a revelation as the plot goes on and his journey progresses.  He becomes aware that he can do certain things and certain things happen to him and he’s like, “Wow, that’s useful,” and he actually does say, “That’s useful.”  So yes, he has them all.  I think as soon as he makes that decision, he does what he does in Caligula’s cave, he gains all of those powers, but he’s very unaware of them at the beginning. I mean, he thinks he’s dead at one point and realizes he’s alive and nobody can see him and then he can be seen, he’s seeing ghosts.  It’s interesting because he’s sort of discovering all these things as he goes along, but the vampiric part of him is only seen in very subtle moments.  When he actually does go to bite, you see this incredible transformation, which is unique to this film, it’s unique to Dracula, it’s never been done before.  He doesn’t have the fangs the whole time. I’m not talking with big fangs in my mouth the whole time, even though I have my own fangs. [laughs] Sometimes the unseen is often more exciting and more intriguing to an audience than what you see.  If you spoon-feed every visual element of some character like Dracula, which we’re so used to seeing in so many different representations we’ve seen through the years, this one we’ve chosen to be very clever in when we show these moments of the vampire in him.  But it’s quite beautiful when it happens to him, when he does go for the kill.

On the superhero-like origin tale the film adopts: If you read up about Dracula, he’s able to transform into creatures, he’s able to speak into your head without opening his mouth, he can physically make you do things, move, he can fly, he’s immortal.  He won’t die as long as he doesn’t stay in the sunshine and the daylight.  His wounds heal, he has a few flaws, but you know, he tries to veer away from silver and the daylight, but in a way, we want to keep the human part of him alive so people can relate to him.  He is sort of an antihero in a way, you know?  Even though we’re used to thinking of Dracula as this man who lures women into bed and then kills them for their life force.  Yeah, he does become that, but we’re beginning at the origin.  This is the origin story of Dracula.  Maybe that is where he ends up, in the Bram Stoker of the whole story, but at this point, he’s still hoping that’s not who he’s going to become.  He doesn’t want to become what he sees in that cave up in Broken Tooth Mountain.  That’s not a nice thought that he wants to live like that for the rest of his life.

Will we see his Vlad the Impaler days? Gary and I wanted to be very loyal to the real character here and he was known as Vlad the Impaler and we do touch on it quite a lot, especially when he meets his stepbrother, Mehmet II, played by Dominic Cooper, the Sultan.  I mean, that’s a whole different film, do you know what I mean?  That there is a very dark R-Rated movie, but we don’t ignore the fact that he did do those things and he was a very blood thirsty leader and warrior and he did do some incredibly shocking things.  We do talk about them.  There are scenes when that is brought up and you can see that he’s uncomfortable with the fact that these are being brought up because people have sort of moved on and he’s now become a leader that isn’t all about the fact that he impales people in fields and kills thousands of people, but we don’t ignore the fact either.  It was very important for me to have that element of him in the film because, you know, he is Vlad the Impaler, he was the Lord Impaler, that was his title when he was brought up by the Turks.  He gained all of those killing techniques from the Turks. That’s how he was brought up. That’s where he learned them all. There are a couple of moments where we honor the impaling techniques in very clever ways.  You know, a thing about Vlad was, there’s a lot of history books, there’s a lot of biased history books, but if you read a lot, which I’ve done, you find that he was revered by his people as not just a warlord and a terrifying leader of a country, but he was revered.  He was a very fair ruler, he gave land to not only the aristocracy of his land, but he gave it to the poor people and he often brought in the working class to work with him and fight with him.  He was very clever in that way.  He wasn’t all about money and land.  He was about people feeling that they’ve been something and they owed him something.  It is interesting, and he was very respected by his enemies.  It’s on his tombstone on that little island in Romania where it says, ‘He was a great ruler and respected by his enemies,’ which is a quite impressive thing to have.

On the physicality: Well, you might have seen today; my arms were out today, which is not very much, but I train all day long to keep them because muscles don’t stay big.  They constantly shrink, which is a really annoying thing. [laughs] My trainer is with me all day, we train before I come to work and then I just keep training all day.  It is quite a lot of sort of semi-naked stuff in the film.  It’s not just about looking good out of your clothes.  It was about, again, honoring the character I was playing.  He was a warrior.  He went to battle.  He wasn’t one of those that sent his men to battle.  He was in the frontlines.  He was a very active physical leader so I wanted, and so did the creative team, for him to look correct out of his clothes. I have a lot of scars in the beginning of the film before I become the vampire and it was all about a certain look, so that meant I started training for this job in May and my trainer’s been traveling with me since then and we’ve trained through two movies. He’s been to New Zealand with me and he’s with me every day on the film and we train after work every day and my diet is specific.  It goes on and on and on, but you’re playing a leading role and sometimes that’s what it requires and so I’ve brought it to the table.

On reprising the role of Dracula for future films: Well yeah, if you’re going to start a story anyway, you start at the beginning, right?  You could go anywhere with Dracula right now.  After this movie finishes, the story finishes in a very – it’s like an open book.  Where could he go?  He’s immortal, he’s a lonely man, he can’t go back to his family, he loses his wife, he can’t be around anybody he’s been around, so it could go anywhere.  There’s a lot of discussions about that and it’s very exciting and I’m very much involved in the whole thing. It’s nice to be part of something that could grow into something else and be there at the beginning of it.  It’s very, very nice not to pick up from somebody else’s interpretation of the character.

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