Anton’s Yelchin’s boyish looks are working against him. “I am not necessarily attracted to playing high schoolers anymore. Like, I got pretty over It,” he says. “I haven’t been to high school in five years. I don’t really want to do a high school movie anymore, ever.”
While his character in his latest film, “Fright Night,” is a high school student, he’s quick to point out that’s not a major plot point. In fact, once the action gets going — Yelchin’s Charlie discovers his smooth-talking neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire — it doesn’t matter how old Charlie is as much as how scared he is, which was a major focus for Yelchin. “It adds to Jerry’s menace,” Yelchin says. “The more freaked out he is, the more serene Jerry can be and the more menacing he can be. Because you are Charlie, you’re the one that’s getting freaked out that something’s going to happen.”
Yelchin got to play some dress up, as Charlie dons on impressive homemade vampire-hunting suit late in the film, something he’d be delighted to see fans wearing at next year’s Comic-Con. “They will very quickly discover how uncomfortable that outfit is,” he says. “It was so hot. It’s fireproof. I don’t even know what that material is. It might as well have been bulletproof, too. It looked cool. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.”
Comfort aside, the suit offered some logistical issues: “You have to pick and choose the hours that you’re going to go to the bathroom,” Yelchin says. “There’s no, ‘Oh, I have two minutes to run to the bathroom? Great.’ It’s like, ‘I need 15 minutes to do what normally takes 30 seconds.’ It was fun, though. It was a bitch but it was fun.”
No method necessary
Co-stars Yelchin and Farrell didn’t feel the need to stay away from each other off-camera to master that dynamic, though some actors might’ve gone that route. “I’ve never really done that with anyone unless I needed to, unless I really felt like I couldn’t do this without just staying in it,” he says. “We seemed to get along pretty well. We definitely weren’t like, ‘You stay in one corner and I’ll stay in another one,’ you know what I mean?”
