There’s nothing quite like a Nicolas Cage performance, and there’s even fewer things like the one he gives in Vampire’s Kiss, an absolutely bug-fucking-nuts horror/comedy from 1988 that you very well might have seen YouTube compilations of clips from at some point in your history browsing the internet. Before you read this next sentence, do yourself a favor and go watch that movie — it’s weird, it’s a great time, and it’s pretty short. Crazy, right? So, it’s absolutely interesting that, some 30-odd years after that film was released, Cage is finally returning to the vampire subgenre in a pretty meaty role: Big ol’ Dracula himself in Chris McKay’s Renfield.
Via Deadline, which came in clutch with some pretty interesting information at the end of what seems to be a pretty slow news week, Cage will play Nosferatu alongside Nicholas Hoult (that’s got to be a pretty funny set, trying to separate the two of them by name), who will star as the vampire’s assistant/servant Renfield, who is, as you may have guessed, the film’s protagonist. Interestingly, the outline for the script was written by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, though the script itself was penned by Ryan Ridley.
Here’s Deadline with some handy background information and a few scant pieces of news about Renfield‘s setting:
“In the original ‘Dracula’ novel, R.M. Renfield was an inmate at a lunatic asylum who was thought to be suffering from delusions but actually is a servant of Dracula. Plot details of the movie weren’t announced, but it’s believed to take place during the present day and is not a period piece.”
That’s pretty much all there is for information about this one and, as is typical with projects like this, there’s not any real news about a start date or a release, so you might have to wait a while for Renfield. With that said: We weren’t the world’s biggest fans of The Tomorrow War, we will say that McKay’s pretty solid when he’s working within a genre that might not take itself so seriously as that film did, and this sounds pretty goddamn goofy to have attracted Cardiac Cage himself to the role of the vampire in charge. But you should also go and watch Pig so you can be reminded of just how awesome Cage is, though real ones will know the truth: He’s always awesome.