Nicolas Cage Has Nabbed The Role He Was (Probably) Born To Play, Taking The Part Of Dracula In A Movie About Renfield

Nicolas Cage is certainly no stranger to over-the-top acting gigs. This year alone, the Oscar-winning thespian has received some of the best reviews of his career for Pig, a movie that sounds, on its face, as wackadoodle as the one in which he plays a janitor battling murderous amusement park attractions. But perhaps his craziest role was in 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss. Effectively a film-length supercut of Nicolas Cage going nutso, it finds him playing a greedy NYC yuppie convinced he’s a real vampire, even though he probably isn’t. At one point Cage eats a cockroach. It was real.

Jump some three decades, and Cage will finally play an actual vampire: As per The Hollywood Reporter, he’s been cast as the archetypal bloodsucker himself, Count Dracula. He won’t, alas, be the star. The movie is called Renfield, and it’s centered around the Transylvanian’s most devoted acolyte, to be played by Nicholas Hoult. (Tom Waits played him, quite memorably, in the Francis Ford Coppola version from 1992.)

It’s the latest in Universal’s so-far-successful attempt to rehab their instantly aborted Dark Universe, which was supposed to be an MCU/DCEU take on the studio’s classic monsters, and which was killed right out of the gate by the Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy. After the success of last year’s The Invisible Man, a stripped-down, outside-the-box take on the horror classic, Universal has adopted a new, cheaper, more adventurous strategy, as evidenced by Renfield.

So good for Nicolas Cage, lover of outrageous accents, who will finally, finally get to whip up his own creative stab at sounding Transylvanian.