See Nicolas Cage In His Craziest Role Ever In Wild Renfield Trailer
Nicolas Cage is Dracula in this bloody and comedic trailer for Renfield.
Nicolas Cage is finally here as Count Dracula in the trailer for the upcoming movie Renfield and it is hard to deny that this may be the role he was always meant to play. Though the trailer does not fully reveal Cage as the master vampire until the last few moments, it does a great job of building up anticipation and comedic dread for when the pale-skinned, elaborately-beringed Nosferatu interrupts his assistant (Nicholas Hoult) in a support group meeting. You can never really predict the next step that Nicolas Cage is going to take in his very weird career, but Renfield already looks like a promising one.
The trailer opens with Nicholas Hoult interrupting some kind of community support group meeting led by The Other Two’s Brandon Scott Jones, under the auspices that he needs to get out of a “toxic” relationship. It seems to be the premise of the film that Nicolas Cage’s Dracula and Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield are now in the modern age (despite the death of both in the original 1897 novel by Bram Stoker) and have relocated to New Orleans, the traditional refuge for emo vampires everywhere. It also seems that Renfield has tired of being the perpetual lackey of an undead monster and wants to try to make some kind of life of his own.
Renfield is clearly playing fast and loose with the traditions of vampire lore, with it quickly becoming apparent that Nicholas Hoult has the ability (imparted by Cage’s Dracula) to consume living beings like insects and gain kick-ass fighting powers. This is undoubtedly a reference to the novel’s Renfield consuming bugs and small creatures in order to emulate his master, but why should it not give him some cool superpowers too? This is clearly a goofy, revisionist version of the Dracula mythos, so we are going to try not to think about it too hard.
The actual plot of Nicolas Cage’s Renfield is that Hoult’s character has grown dissatisfied with endlessly bringing victims to his master, whose psychic instructions he can hear in his head. A chance encounter (well, attempted armed robbery of a club) with a traffic cop played by Awkwafina puts Hoult back in connection with his humanity, and no doubt supernatural hijinks will ensue as he is pulled between his loyalty to Dracula and his desire to be human.
Nicolas Cage has memorably portrayed a vampire prior to Renfield, though this movie is clearly intended as an outright comedy (with some elements of action and romance). It actually has a very similar vibe to Nicholas Hoult’s 2013 romantic comedy Warm Bodies, in which he plays a post-apocalypse zombie who gets back in touch with his humanity after a chance encounter with a living human (Teresa Palmer). It seems that Hollywood has decided that Nicholas Hoult is the guy for revisionist takes on established horror fantasy tales, but if he is bringing Nicolas Cage in a top hat along with him, that’s fine by us.
