E.L. Nice to talk with you Robert. I interviewed you years ago in Toronto, and I’ve never forgotten it!
R.E. Toronto! You guys have had a rough year, gosh, with winter and SARS and a blackout!

E.L. Yes, we have.
R.E. Walking wounded. I love you. I love your town. I did Urban Legend there. I finally figured out how to walk in Toronto. It took me a while to learn how to walk Toronto, but I learned all the neighborhoods.

E.L. Congratulations on having the number one film. This has got to be one of the most physical roles you’ve had in the history of the Freddy films. How tough was it to do the prep work and get into this incredible fight/action choreography?
R.E. I’m not a kid anymore, obviously. My prep mostly was in the pool in the hotel. I did all my own underwater stunts and all the water stuff. And the fights are pretty easy ’cause we had a great team of stunt co-ordinators. Ken Kerzinger, - he’s from Vancouver, a Canadian stunt co-ordinator - he plays Jason. He helped me a lot with the fights and he really knew how to pull the punches, and he promised he wouldn’t fall on me! He’d roll over on me (and he’s a big dog!). But what I mostly did was in the pool. We were all staying in the same hotel. It was when X-Men was being done too. I was doing laps with Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart, and Robert Carradine was there doing that Hilary Duff film. But I would just do my laps, only I would do them underwater. I got so I could hold my breath underwater for up to two minutes. And that was really the main training. There comes a point when you’re making a movie like this where between the early call for the makeup and the fight scenes and the black-and-blue marks and the wires hooked to your (ahem!) lower extremities for the wire work and the cold of the lake and the mud and the wet that you just want to kind of get through, so it becomes one day at a time, each day. And we worked a month of nights and I can remember, it actually came about just when I wanted to eat in the morning, because for me, it was like four in the afternoon, and you just sort of want to get your biological clock to tick at that point — to just show up.

E.L. I read that you had minestrone soup for breakfast.
R.E. I went to this place; I think it’s where Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were staying. It was another hotel down the street and they served through — between lunch and dinner. You could go in there and it was this great soup, and I think the secret ingredient was a little bit of sugar. I would crawl in there at like four in the afternoon, (which to me was like dawn), and I’d have a glass of red wine and a bowl of soup and literally, it was the only thing that got me through the day ’cause my face was raw. They used extra glue on me because of the water stunts. They didn’t want my prosthetic foam latex pieces to expand. I’d look like a water balloon, so they double and triple glued me with a medical adhesive. It’s that stuff they use for colostomy bags. (I think they call it Frank Sinatra #2!). But anyway, they would baste me with that, like a turkey for Thanksgiving and slam my pieces on me, but they couldn’t get it off. So they would scrub me and scrub me and scrub me and I was raw on this movie, and thank God for the minestrone soup at my favorite hotel in Vancouver.

E.L. No matter what the outcome of the showdown in the movie, in your mind, could there one day be another Freddy/Jason re-match?
R.E. (laughs) Let me think. You know, there’s various rumors floating around. The one I prefer or that seems the most imaginative to me. There’s a great Sam Raimi film from years back, The Evil Dead films, and one of my favorite actors, Bruce Campbell, plays this sort of monster-slayer, Ash — the monster killer, making the world safe for democracy from monsters. And I know Bruce and I think he’s terrific and maybe Sam and Bruce could sort of tweak something and use him as a ghostbuster and have him kind of rid the world of Freddy and Jason. I think that might be a hoot.

E.L. How did you feel about sharing the screen time with Jason instead of it being all Freddy, all the time?
R.E. It’s double the monsters, double the body count in this film. And we actually team up for one of our victims — Kelly Rowland, the lovely Miss Rowland from Destiny’s Child. She gets in a little Freddy/Jason sandwich at one moment in the movie. But, you know, I got the top billing. So I’m okay. Freddy vs. Jason, not Jason vs. Freddy! He’s big, he’s dumb, he’s got no style. What can I tell you? Big dog.

E.L. You’re coming up to your 20-year anniversary of playing Freddy. Does that still surprise you after all these years?
R.E. (laughs) I can’t be, I know. I mean, who’d have thunk it? You know, I had a lot of friends in Hollywood back in the day, who were quite successful. Mark Hamill from Star Wars was on my couch for a while, crashing, and I watched other people’s careers and how they dealt with it. And a lot of actors, they try to fight and try to control their careers. You can’t really do that. And I was lucky. I was already established out on the coast as an actor. I’d done a lot of movies in the ’70s before I did Freddy and a TV series too, so I just relaxed and kind of kicked back and enjoyed the ride. I was in my early thirties. I had a younger fan base from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies and from my TV series V and that was kind of invigorating. It made me a little hipper and kept me younger. And this great thing about horror movies, like action films: they travel well and they’re international successes too, so I’ve been able to work all over the world. I’ve done eight or nine movies in Europe. I’ve got a movie at the Venice Film Festival next week and I’m going over there and I wouldn’t have had that opportunity or those doors opened for me, had I not just sort of hung on and enjoyed the success and the ride that the Nightmare on Elm Street movies provided me.

E.L. Thanks Robert. I hope you get to come to Toronto again.
R.E. Alright. Tell everybody in Toronto to just take a deep breath, everything’s over now. It’s okay. Enjoy the rest of the summer!