– It’s Like Being a Disney Princess –
by Maggie Boccella | Collider | October 3, 2024
It’s not every day that someone gets to make a vampire movie. Despite the fact that they’re one of the most famous monsters to ever grace the silver screen — not to mention the hundreds of years of superstitions, novels, and other ephemera — not everybody is brave enough to tackle them, whether in front of or behind the camera. They’re weirdly sacred, especially to those (like me) who are obsessed with them.
But what happens if you take them out of their castles and dark, dank coffins and put them somewhere different, more familiar? Well, that’s the premise behind The Radleys, a new supernatural black comedy about a family of suburban, blood-abstaining vampires whose life goes to the bats when an accident puts their secret out in the open. Based on Matt Haig’s novel of the same name, Damian Lewis and Kelly Macdonald lead the film as Peter and Helen, the sober heads of the family trying to keep everything together in the face of a rather unusual problem.
Lewis has a fun secret of his own though: he’s playing more than one vampire, as Peter brings his twin brother Will into the fold to help with their little issue. Will is…let’s say, a little more laissez-faire than his brother, unafraid of what he is and doing away with the thirteen-step program that Peter and Helen introduce their children to after their eldest daughter’s little slip-up.
Macdonald and Lewis Got to Sink Their Teeth Into a Fun Challenge in The Radleys
When I sat down with Lewis and Macdonald, as well as director Euros Lyn, to talk about the film, they all agreed that the challenge of the twins was an entertaining one, and not all that difficult for the actors to sink their teeth into. “I mean, apart from the costumes that were a bit of a giveaway, the swagger that Damian’s got as Will…that kind of swagger was a dead giveaway,” Macdonald says. “For any actor playing twins, I think, is kind of one of those things, like being a Disney princess or something, that doesn’t come along for everybody. And then as fun as that was for him, it was really surprisingly fun for me to play against both of them because…they’re poles apart, the way she feels about both of them, and so that was just really fun in trying to work out…playing it so that it wasn’t totally obvious what the story was there.”
She says that putting her own mark on vampires wasn’t too much of a challenge given the odd suburban, PTA-friendly nature of her character — but Will, on the other hand, is living his best nocturnal life, the “cool professor in college that all the girls fall in love with,” as Lewis says. I compared him a bit to Lestat from Interview With the Vampire, with his freewheeling spirit, which Lewis describes as “that naughty part of ourselves, that lustful, desirous, party head that wants to go out and drink too much and go all night.”
“He’s such a mercurial actor,” Lyn says of his star, “Because he’s the nicest man in the world and he’s such a charming, generous, warm-hearted person…but also, he’s got a real streak of mischief in him and a really strong, kind of naughty aspect to his character…so I knew that he was able to play these two brothers and take them in very different directions. Those moral choices that both the characters have made, he was really interested in exploring, as well as sexual tension that exists between Peter and Helen, and then Will, when he turns up. So yeah, he’s got it all. He’s the full package.”
The Radleys Tackles Big Themes With a Monstrous Grin
Lyn is no stranger to the fantastic, of course. Alongside his work directing Heartstopper, he’s probably best known for his various credits in the Doctor Who universe, helming iconic episodes like “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “The Runaway Bride,” and “Silence in the Library,” as well as all five episodes of the spinoff season Torchwood: Children of Earth.
“I think that the thing I love about sci-fi and fantasy is that really, deep down, they are stories that are actually about us human beings,” he tells me, “And the thing that I love the most in these heightened genres is that they give you a chance to explore some of the darker stuff about the human psyche that maybe you couldn’t do in a naturalistic piece. And vampires, it’s such a brilliant genre to explore some pretty dark stuff about our relationship with death and with killing, and the desire for blood as a metaphor for the desire for sex.”
For Lewis and Macdonald, though, the appeal was in the normalcy the Radleys use to cover up their monstrous nature, rather than the blood-sucking itself. “That’s why I think it’s got a nice, cheeky slant on the vampire genre,” Lewis says. “The comedic premise of the film is that this family [is] living this dull, suburban life and they’ve got a big secret, and no one knows what it is until this event happens in the film. And then [the] shit hits the fan, all hell breaks loose.”
“If I’d had to walk into some sort of vampire assembly in a big costume and fangs in and sort of…that would have been a whole different thing,” Macdonald agreed. “But actually it is weird to think how unusual it is that it’s a suburban family. [I’m playing] a mom who, to the outside world, just seems very normal, to her family, just seems completely highly strung and not fun.”
That’s what gives the film its unique edge, especially when it comes to tackling mature subject matter like infidelity and sobriety, which both Helen and Peter have to cope with when Will comes to town. Masking it with lots and lots of theatrical blood — which Lewis said gave him a sugar high when their beetroot juice blood alternative didn’t work out — makes it easier to relay, and as Lyn says, “the path to abstention never runs straight and there are [always] some slip-ups on the way.”
Adapting The Radleys Vampire Family Was a Unique Opportunity
All of them universally agree that vampires are at the top of the pop culture food chain when it comes to movie monsters. Macdonald relays an endearing story about being obsessed with Gary Oldman’s Dracula in her teens — “I had a picture of [him] ripped out from a magazine in what I thought was a very vampiric kind of frame” — while Lewis remembers growing up with films like The Lost Boys, both of which have had innumerable influence on the horror film canon.
But Lyn arguably had the biggest challenge of them all: giving the Radleys their own unique twist while also honoring Haig’s original novel. He’s intimately familiar with bringing texts to life already, having directed sixteen episodes of Netflix’s Heartstopper, adapted from Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series, but vampires pose their own special challenges, and he says he wanted to explore the “mythic elements” that come with such an old legend, the “innocent character, sometimes the innocent virgin, a young person who’s not been corrupted, [and] an older character who has kind of been around the block who’s got this evil, malevolent presence.” But with the film’s suburban setting, he hopes that fans will see some of themselves and the novel they love in the final film.
“When there’s something out there like this novel that Matt’s written, or with Heartstopper…that responsibility for bringing those things that people already have a love for to life on a screen is a big responsibility. And it can go two ways because fans can be like, “Oh, that’s not how I saw this character,” or, “I didn’t see it this way.” But hopefully, when fans of the novel come to this film, they’ll recognize the novel that they fell in love with and hopefully we’ll feel that we’ve honored it.”
The Radleys will be in US theaters, Video on Demand, and various streaming services like Amazon Video and AppleTV Friday, October 4, 2024, and SkyTV/NOW in the UK on October 18, 2024.
Read the rest of the original article at Collider