Horror Icon Robert Englund, AKA Freddy Krueger, Gets His Hollywood Star On Halloween

Whoever came up with this timing deserves a star themselves. On October 31, Halloween, the scariest day of the year, actor Robert Englund will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Englund is best known for playing horror icon Freddy Krueger, who has terrified generations of filmgoers in The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

Englund, as warm and personable man as you’ll likely meet in Hollywood, acknowledges and appreciates the timing. He says the Walk of Fame holds many special memories for him. “As a little child, I frequented Hollywood Boulevard in its sort of early middle 1950s heyday and saw many, many films accompanied by my parents,” Englund says. “I remember the glamor of Hollywood Boulevard, and I remember the hills and valleys that Hollywood Boulevard has had, where my star is being installed.”

That placement, too, has meaning. The star is right in front of Larry Edmunds Bookshop, which specializes in film, TV and theater books. When Englund was a young actor looking for his first big break, his two roommates worked at the bookstore. He would pop over on their lunch hour to share a sandwich “because, you know, none of us had any money in those days.” The pair was working on a screenplay that eventually became the 1987 cult classic The Lost Boys—the trio had quite the nose for horror films, as it turned out.

Englund has loads of stories about early Hollywood, his “starving actor” years, and landing the part of Freddy Krueger. He enjoys discussing the Nightmare franchise and how his famous makeup evolved (nothing but praise for all the artists involved). And he has fascinating insights on how he developed the character who became arguably the most infamous slasher of all time—the knife fingers give him an edge on Jason (Friday the 13^th) and Michael Myers (Halloween).

Right now, Englund is enjoying the publicity push for his star and a new 4K DVD collection of Nightmare, which includes all seven movies, that Warner Bros. is releasing to commemorate four decades of the films.

How Robert Englund Became Freddy Krueger

Englund had appeared in about a dozen movies when he earned his first major hit—starring in the hugely successful miniseries V on NBC. “I’d love to say that working with Wes Craven on Nightmare was some aesthetic choice I’d make at the time. But no—it literally fit my schedule,” Englund said. He was on hiatus between the miniseries and the launch of a new V series, and Nightmare was shot in between.

Englund appreciated Craven’s work on The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left, and he loved the Nightmare script. “It was like reading Stephen King. It was just great fun reading and different, and Wes told me the story and what he was going to do with it, what he thought the symbolism was,” Englund remembers.

He describes Freddy Krueger as “a burned boogeyman that haunts the dreams of the children of the vigilante parents that burned him alive.” He said he found part of the animus for his character during early filming, as he watched Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp, the then young and unproven stars of the film, on set.

He’d been up since 4 a.m., in part to get Freddy’s extensive makeup applied, “and in walked Johnny Depp and Heather Langenkamp, arguably the two most attractive human beings in the continental United States at that time.” Englund was hot, sweaty and tired, and watching the seemingly dewy actors without a care in the world sparked something in him.

“I realized that my envy for Johnny and Heather, that my jealousy of them being younger and beautiful and having their whole careers ahead of them—and they were obviously both destined for success—that I could use that as a subtext for Freddy, because Freddy’s killing the future. He’s killing innocence, and that’s a synapse that I could use,” said Englund.

And he did. Through every film, Englund drew on that moment. “It’s a trick that actors use as an equivalency. And once I’ve had that thought and that envy and that jealousy and my second-guessing saying yes to the role of Freddy, I could convert that, and I can close my eyes as I’m sitting here talking to you and remember that moment, and I can use that mentally to get me in character,” Englund says.