SPOILERS ahead for Run Sweetheart Run, now streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription.
The undead are alive and well in Hollywood, and Game of Thrones’ Pilou Asbæk is at the center of two recent projects all about vampires. The first is Run Sweetheart Run, a horror movie about a business meeting-turned-date-turned-overnight vampire hunt where Asbæk plays the predator and Charlie’s Angels’ Ella Balinska is the prey. As the Danish actor sinks his teeth into the world of bloodsuckers, he shared his favorite from the genre.
Run Sweetheart Run flips typical vampire tropes on its head by making Pilou Asbæk’s vampire completely unromantic. As the movie’s writer/director Shana Feste told us as well, she sought to “demonize” vampires in Run Sweetheart Run after a history of toxic dynamics between the alive and undead. When CinemaBlend spoke to Pilou Asbæk about how his vampire fits into his perception of vampire lore in Hollywood, here’s what he said:
I think the guy who kind of created the fantasies about vampires that’s Gary Oldman in Dracula, the way he did that scene with me Winona Ryder, ‘I traveled the oceans of time to be with you’, et cetera, et cetera, that kind of made proceedings for how we perceive it. And it’s personally one of my favorite vampire films. So for me it was more like, how evil can you be and still be fascinating, you know what I mean? How can I create a character with Ella and with Shana where he's still like, you're still like, ‘Oh, but I wanna, is he that bad? Is he that bad? Is he just misunderstood and is he that bad?’ And, he is that bad. He's a demon vampire or something. And, a hero is only as good as the villain is written.
Of course, Pilou Asbæk is referring to the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Gary Oldman as Count Dracula, along with the likes of Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins in the cast. The movie is among the actor’s most beloved movies about vampires, but for such a different vision, the actor had to take something specific from it. He implemented that yearning one feels for vampires while also playing a super monstrous and very evil take on the lore. Asbæk continued:
I will always defend my character because that's my job as an actor. I don't want to go like, ‘Oh, he is evil just because he is evil’. No, the whole story, the whole last couple of scenes with him, he's like, ‘I like you. You're nice. I have to eat you, but you actually touch my arm and instead of just going, I have to eat you.’ It's when there's something at stake that things become interesting.
Pilou Asbæk got into character for Ethan by toying with the idea of someone you were with suddenly wasn’t the person he showed you and the world; the idea that one day you could wake up next to a person you didn’t think would be a mark of a “true psychopath.” As Asbæk also shared in our interview, the presence of Ethan is something that a lot of women can relate to in terms of being the kind of figure they’d fear when going on a date.
The movie produced by Blumhouse has been on the backburner for two years now, with its streaming announcement made back in 2020, hitting Amazon Prime over Halloweekend. Following this film, Pilou Asbæk is set to star in the Stephen King adaptation of Salem’s Lot, which is also all about vamps. In the movie, the actor will play Richard Straker, the “familiar” to the main antagonist and vampire villain of Salem’s Lot, Kurt Barlow.
Salem’s Lot recently lost an official release date after a previous shakeup, but we’ll keep you updated about all the upcoming horror movies coming our way here on CinemaBlend.
