Jackie Earle Haley is delighted to step out of the shadows as Elm Street monster Freddy Krueger. Steve Pratt reports.

NO ONE one will argue with actor Jackie Earle Haley when he says “I guess I like playing the darker guys”. The former child actor was recently seen as a disturbed inmate of a mental hospital in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. That followed an Oscar nomination for his role as a paedophile in Little Children and playing vicious masked vigilante Rorschach in comic book movie Watchmen.

Add his TV role as a shady number-cruncher Guerrero in Human Target on Syfy (previously known as Sci fi) and Haley has the nasty characters market covered.

But his latest villain is one of the most iconic – stripeyjumpered, sharp-fingered Freddy Krueger, the villain who jumps out on people in their dreams, in a new version of horror classic A Nightmare On Elm Street.

He would appear more than qualified to bring undead Krueger back to movie screens and doesn’t mind playing another dark guy. “I think people like me playing them so there’s that too. It’s just part of the business and how it works but I definitely find it interesting,” he says.

“It was a real challenge though. The notion of getting to play such an iconic character was incredibly exciting and after Rorschach?

It was like, ‘wow!’ These two iconic guys.”

He admits he’s “scared to death” to hear what Nightmare fans make of his interpretation, but concludes that he wouldn’t mind if people say he’s not as good as his predecessor. “A lot of that hardcore base is going to have a hard time that it isn’t Robert (Englund), how do you compare? You can’t, because its one movie versus decades of developing a cultural icon.

I’m perfectly happy to be second place Freddie, it’s not a competition.”

To prepare for the role, Haley started reading up on vampire legend Nosferatu and serial killers – specifically Ed Kemper, a man who murdered a string of female hitchhikers in the US in the Seventies, but he hit a brick wall when he realised there was no emotional depth to either Kemper or Krueger.

“I took all my research and threw it across the room and thought, ‘I’m playing a monster, I’m playing a boogie man’. I realised that I wasn’t playing this deep character, and that I didn’t need to torture myself in that direction for Freddy. He was a boogie man and that’s what I needed to embrace,” he explains.

He admits that he “almost drove myself psychotic”

preparing to be Rorschach.

Playing Krueger was not as intense, partly because of the three-and-a-half hours he had to spend in make-up getting the Freddie look.

“I left Freddy pretty much on set. I also had a lot of decompression time in that when they say ‘wrap’ I’ve got an hour of make-up removal. I can safely say that what stuck with me most with Freddy was the glue,” he jokes.

“It was kind of ironic discovering that after all those years of Nightmare On Elm Street, the only real person being tortured was Robert Englund, in the make-up chair for three to four hours a day.

Unbelievable.”

He didn’t manage to meet up with Englund to swap notes about playing Freddie.

But, while he isn’t a “horror fan, per se”, Haley remembers the original franchise. “I recall seeing the commercials and went to see it in the theatre because the concept looked fresh. There was more going on and I remember kind of digging it. It wasn’t my favourite movie in the world but it is what it is.”

He found fame at 13 in The Bad News Bears but jobs gradually became harder to get. “There was a time when I didn’t think I would work again,” he says.

“When you’re any age, but especially if you’re a kid, and you’re a famous actor and a celebrity, your self-identity gets attached to that, so when it drifts away your selfidentity drifts away with it. I had a decade or more as an adult to try to work through that stuff, and I kind of did, I was 93 per cent OK, but there was still a bit where I’d go to a movie wishing I was practising that craft but just accepting that life does what it does.”

Haley thinks the work dried up because he didn’t grow up to be the “teen hunk” film bosses were expecting.

His return to the screen after a 15 year hiatus is thanks to Sean Penn and director Steve Zaillian who, by coincidence, both thought of casting him in their film All The King’s Men. “It was an absolute godsend. Steve just called and said ‘hey man, do you want to try this again?’,”

he recalls.

■ A Nightmare On Elm Street (18) opens in cinemas tomorrow.