If the name doesn't ring a bell, Caleb Landry Jones is the very scary brother character in Jordan Peele's modern classic
Get Out , and has shown up in several high-profile projects. One of the most underrated, versatile actors working today in my opinion — and in light of this story, nobody can really question his dedication. Were it not for how menacing he is on screen or for how brilliant he is at his job, I'd probably laugh my head off at the notion of a dude playing Dracula and refusing to break out of his presumed Romanian accent even whilst conducting press interviews. Jones sat down with
Collider 's Steve Weintraub to discuss the upcoming horror flick
Dracula: A Love Tale , and teased that we'll get a much more first-person point of view from this iteration of the character than in previous movies:
"I'm excited. […] Usually we do not see the character from this perspective in a sense. We do not get to stay with him for as long as we do in this film. Usually, the monster is away, and we play around with this throughout the film. […] We get to spend time with him in a way that we have not before, which is good. Usually, [movies] take the monster away from you. This one gives the monster to you." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7uOvBtzKaI The bizarre part, of course, is that Jones is unwavering in his commitment to the Dracula voice. He's also seated on the actual set, in one of the many costumes he'll don throughout the film. It's revealed later in the interview that there are well upwards of 20 costume changes, as the love story portrayed in this Dracula narrative spans across four centuries, starting in the 15th and ending in the 18th. That passage of time should feed the character's desperate need for love, as his immortality obviously gets in the way of, ahem, long-term commitments. But yeah, the fact that Jones was more or less in-character for this interview made it too bizarre not to share. There have been many successful actors who don't have to stay in-accent or in-character throughout a movie or TV shoot. However, some of these artists like Jones, Daniel Day-Lewis, and even
Succession 's Jeremy Strong really immerse themselves to that degree. Day-Lewis took things to extraordinary extremes, refusing to answer to any name other than "Mr. President" while filming
Lincoln, for instance. Or at least I'm pretty sure Steven Spielberg shared that anecdote once upon a time. Point is, it was a little odd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYE64D-355o I mean shoot, Day-Lewis won a Best Actor Oscar for that performance, so who's to say he was out of line? I say whatever it takes to get the job done, go for it. Let that freak flag fly. Alienate everyone else if you must. Just don't be an a**hole. Strong took a lot of heat from his own costar, Brian Cox, for how he carried himself on the
Succession set. It just so happens I made a TikTok a while back about so-called "Method acting" and why that's a misconstrued catch-all phrase.
Ellen Burstyn once told my eager peers and I that there are only two types of acting: good acting and bad acting. How you get there doesn't necessarily matter. Jones is clearly not leaving anything to chance in portraying such an iconic character. The pressure is perhaps even greater since Bill Skarsgård is taking on the role of Count Orlok — aka Nosferatu, based on Dracula — in
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu remake coming out on Christmas. Comparisons between the two highly anticipated projects are an inevitability, even if their styles, tones and plot focuses are like apples to oranges. PS, I went down a rabbit hole for this story because I remembered how in
Tropic Thunder , Robert Downey Jr's Kirk Lazarus is satirizing how over-serious actors can be. He remarks at one point in the movie that he doesn't break character until he wraps the DVD commentary. Come to find out,
RDJ showed up to Tropic Thunder 's DVD commentary, in-character as Kirk Lazarus, playing his movie-within-a-movie role of Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris in real life. He was indeed a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. Would've embedded that at the end, too, if the video I found wasn't YouTube age-restricted. We can only hope that Caleb Landry Jones keeps his accent for
Dracula: A Love Tale 's commentary track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O19HyqsGBjM
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