Quotes

When I was 9, I went to a birthday party. We were supposed to see a cowboy movie, but the programming got screwed up and we saw The Bad Seed (1956) instead. Horrifying. For years I was frightened of girls with pigtails.

I saw an entire magazine of Freddy Krueger tattoos. Hey, I'm a classically trained actor who was doing [Anton Chekhov], and now there are thousands of people walking around America with my tattoo on them. I just take it as pop culture.

I get a lot of teenagers going, 'Yo, Krueger,' and honking their horn and giving me the claw. Yeah, I'm recognized.

Gosh, I'd like to direct Our Town on stage.

But it's mostly about pacing yourself when you do these movies.

And in Freddy vs. Jason I like when Jason and I double team Destiny's Child.

You're going to have to surrender a little bit to the contrivance of how Freddy and Jason get together.

I think superheroes today are like whistle blowers.

The last time we had Freddy in reality was part two and Freddy sort of went out on his own.

Most of my nightmares involve me forgetting my lines in a stage play.

Many great horror stories are period pieces and English actors have a facility for historic characters.

Kids today don't watch a black and white movie.

Jeff Bridges taught me a lot about how to keep a scene fresh.

I wouldn't want the pressure of a Six Feet Under or the pressure of improvising like Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I would like to see the technology used to explore more period horror genre works, for example, E. A. Poe.

I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival.

I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American.

I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character.

If they do something like that, maybe a Freddy Krueger fan, a girl, a really sick goth girl starts killing kids herself and Freddy has to put a stop to it, or they have to fight it out.

I'm basically a movie actor now, and my big roles are mostly horror movies - unless I'm doing a guest star or something - and occasionally I try to get back into television.

I have friends that are much better actors than I am that had to quit the business because they couldn't survive the auditions or the rejections, or people just didn't realize how good they were.

The modern horror audience is wise to our tricks this lets it in on the gag.

[observation, 2014] I'm on my third generation of fans. It's not strange at all for me to go someplace and have a father come up with his sons that he watched ['A Nightmare on Elm Street'] with when they were 12, and invited some friends for a sleepover.

[on his wide-ranging career, including Shakespeare] I had a nude scene with Susan Sarandon, for God's sake. I've done fight scenes with Kris Kristofferson and Richard Gere. I was in all sorts of places in the 1970s. I shot Burt Reynolds point-blank, so I have been around the block.

Freddy Krueger is a great politically incorrect villain, the logo character of a franchise spawned by a low-budget movie, made by some reasonably artistic people who came up with a gimmick. And it is a great gimmick - the idea that a bogey man, a revenge-motif serial killer could manifest himself in the subconscious of the children of the people that did him wrong. Freddy likes it, he is having fun doing it. He is unapologetic about that. You have a punk-rock nihilistic villain.

[on his favorite Freddy Krueger kill - that of a hearing-impaired character in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)] It's such a Cronenberg [David Cronenberg] head explosion. The guys loved doing that. But yeah, what I love is that it's a real politically incorrect sequence, ya know. And I hate the fact...I know many, I don't even know what the politically correct term is anymore. I don't think it's disabled anymore...special needs actors. Gosh, I work with actors that are in wheelchairs or have problems with their sight, and they don't just want to play goody goody people all the time. They don't just have to be the good guy. Or the nice guy. Or the saint. Or the martyr. They want to be bad guys and villains as well. And I love the political incorrectness of that. Freddy's an equal opportunity serial killer. He doesn't care if you've got a hearing aid. He'll get ya. That's my favorite Freddy kill. Because of all the ramifications for it.