DETROIT — There’s a world where Robert Englund is still a mild-mannered actor in Michigan and he never made his way to Elm Street and into all those teenagers’ nightmares.
Before he was known for cutting people up with his fingers, Englund cut his teeth in Metro Detroit. He spent four years working and studying at Meadow Brook Theatre from 1968 to 1972, and he envisioned himself staying in Michigan for the long haul, doing stock theater in Traverse City and owning a summer home on Houghton Lake. He would have been your friendly neighborhood drama scholar.
Of course that is not what happened. Englund, who grew up in California, started auditioning in Hollywood and he put together a string of parts before landing the iconic role of Freddy Krueger, who for two decades haunted the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series in his dusty fedora, tattered red-and-green sweater and leather glove with knives for appendages. With the original “A Nightmare on Elm Street” turns 40 this weekend, and Englund, 77, says the movie doesn’t happen without his time spent here.
“Michigan is integral to my success and who I am today,” says Englund, on the phone last week from his Laguna Beach, California, home. “About the only thing I didn’t like was the winter, but I loved everything else.”
That includes the hamburgers and milkshakes at Red Knapp’s in downtown Rochester, where he lived in an apartment which cost a whopping $150 a month. He loved the Detroit Institute of Arts and Cranbrook and the campus at Oakland University, where he’d drink with his fellow actors inside the English pub at the Dodge stables after a show. He even loved hitchhiking around town, and says he was once picked up by a driver he recognized as a young Bob Seger.
But Hollywood, as they say, came calling, and Englund returned West and never looked back. And he has no regrets, though he does miss those burgers at Knapp’s, and hopes to have one while he’s in town this weekend.
A ‘magical time’
Englund was raised in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, and he had a childhood friend whose yard backed up to the lot at RKO Pictures, where he’d peer through the chain link fence and watch crews do pickup shots for cowboy movies. He studied acting at California State University, Northridge and he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but the draft complicated his ability to leave the country and he wasn’t sure what his next move was.
When an American branch of the London academy launched at Oakland University, he auditioned and was accepted, and he and his then-wife packed up their car and drove across the country to Rochester.
“It was a great, busy, magical time,” says Englund. “There were all these people that had been on the West End and had been at the Royal Academy and had worked Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay.”
Englund was an understudy and a crew member and learned his way around every aspect of the theater. He starred in productions of “The Crucible,” “Life With Father” and “The Fantasticks” and toured around Michigan and the Midwest, performing Shakespeare and other classic plays. He worked with actors from Stratford, Ontario, who would visit the theater to get hours on their Equity cards.
In the theater’s off months, Englund picked up other jobs around town. He taught and directed a play at Cranbrook, and he ran a spotlight during Pine Knob’s opening season, where he says he watched Liza Minnelli swallow a bug on stage. His wife attended one of Marvin Gaye’s recording sessions for “What’s Going On,” and he remembers seeing Suzi Quatro at the Roostertail in Detroit.
About those winters he detests: He remembers slipping on black ice in a parking lot and injuring his wrist while breaking the fall, and he says he never quite healed correctly. (It was his right hand, which went on to be his gloved hand in the “Elm Street” movies.)
As fruitful as his time here was, by 1972 Englund was beginning to hear the call of Hollywood. He had begun dealing with internal politics inside Meadow Brook, and he saw some of his old theater classmates from college starting to appear in movies, such as Martin Scorsese’s “Boxcar Bertha.” He was getting the itch and was ready to try something else.
He starred in a production of “The Matchmaker” opposite Naomi Stevens, who had logged dozens of TV and film roles, and when her agent came to see the show, he ended up signing Englund to a deal, telling him he’d stolen the stage from her. Englund went out to L.A. and auditioned for a role in the crime drama “Buster and Billie” and he got the part, playing a sidekick to Jan Michael Vincent’s character. He was off to the races.
More roles followed, in B-movies such as “Hustle,” “Eaten Alive” and “The Great Smokey Roadblock,” until Englund landed the part of his dreams, and everyone else’s nightmares.
A new ‘Nightmare’
Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” released on Nov. 9, 1984 — the movie hit Metro Detroit theaters a week later — launched a franchise and turned series villain Freddy Krueger, played by Englund, into a rock star. The film concerned a group of teenagers who are stalked in their nightmares by a vicious killer who could only get to them in their sleep.
It’s not that there hadn’t been teenage slashing horror baddies before — see “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s” Leatherface, “Halloween’s” Michael Myers and “Friday the 13th’s” Jason Voorhees — but Freddy had a style and a sense of humor that made him even bigger than the series he was in. As Freddy became a pop culture mainstay, even partying with spring breakers on MTV, Englund went along for the ride.
“I heard Mark Hamill say this, which Mel Brooks told him, that you don’t get off the merry-go-round until it stops,” says Englund. “You can control your career to a certain point, and then you have to surrender. Like Shelley Long, who left ‘Cheers.’ She’s wonderful, funny, cute. But she got off the merry-go-round too soon, and not only does Hollywood not forget that, but there’s this strange sort of organic timing. As much as we’re actors and we can read a script and know whether we’re right or wrong and whether we can do it or not, you still don’t know how other people see you.”
Meadow Brook Theatre’s managing director Cheryl Marshall says she can always see the classically trained actor inside Englund when he’s on screen, like all actors who come from a theater background.
“No matter what shows they’re in, that training always comes out a little bit, I think,” says Marshall, who says she’s reached out to Englund to return to Meadow Brook, so far to no avail. “You can just see little pieces and parts of what they’ve learned along the way.”
The way people see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” has changed over the years, and modern audiences tend to laugh more than initial audiences did. That’s OK, Englund says.
“There becomes this detachment that after something is iconic, it can also become camp,” Englund says. In the first “Elm Street,” “some stuff accidentally becomes camp, and some stuff is played for melodrama. And then now that we know that Freddy cracked wise in many of the sequels, you see Freddy’s sense of humor a little more in the first one. We probably jumped the shark by the time we got to ‘Freddy’s Dead,’ but we did it intentionally.
“I think Wes Craven and Sam Raimi realized this first, but a lot of times in horror movies you can’t sustain the scare,” he says. “You have to let the audience laugh with you, so that you can set them up and scare them again, or they will laugh at you.”
Englund says he sees Art the Clown from the “Terrifier” series as a worthy successor to the Freddy mantle, although these days his tastes lean away from slashers and more toward psychological horror fare, like “The Witch,” “Midsommar” or “The Descent.”
Over the course of playing Freddy — Englund played him in eight movies, ending with 2003’s horror villain mashup “Freddy vs. Jason” — the role became so big that Englund spent the majority of his career in the horror space, logging nearly 200 roles and directing a pair of horror films, 1988’s “976-EVIL” and 2008’s “Killer Pad.” He remains active; commitments tied to the 40th anniversary of “Elm Street” led to him having to cancel several upcoming movie offers, he says.
“People are still asking for me, and I never would have imagined that it would have lasted this long,” says Englund. “I’ve been acting nonstop since 1964. Take that character in Pinocchio, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, An Actor’s Life For Me.’ It’s just a great life. I can’t do anything else.”
