With the October 25th premiere of NBC’s brand new Dracula adaptation right around the corner, Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors, Velvet Goldmine) sat down with PARADE Magazine to talk about taking on the titular role of this classic horror story, along with why he seems to “play the bad guy a lot”.
“When you’re offered iconic roles like this,” he said when asked what drew him to the project, “you take the opportunity to play them. I thought it would be interesting. It’s a variation on a theme, which is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we can’t just repeat and give the same story, so there are variations of that. I liked the Victorian setting, so we just brought a couple new elements in.”
But what kind of man is Vlad/Dracula/Alexander? Is he even a man at all? PARADE, putting it in the context of heroes versus villains, prompted Meyers to discuss his viewpoint on Dracula the monster – with a sliver of humanity being his tragic flaw.
“Oh, he’s a monster. I want the audience to see him as such. The thing that makes the Dracula story interesting is he’s 99 percent monster and 1 percent human. It’s the 1 percent that causes all the problems. This little bit of humanity is what causes the conflict. If he was all monster, there would be bliss.”
Click here to read the full interview, and stay tuned for more news on NBC’s Dracula (and more), right here on The Vampire Source.
And in case you missed it, check out the full music video trailer below.
[Source: PARADE Magazine | Photo Credit: NBC]