The movie Christopher Lee didn’t want to shoot: “I cannot possibly say these lines”
When one becomes an actor, the fate of their career becomes uncertain. Will you become an icon or merely B-movie fodder, relegated to low-budget pictures and treated as a stock actor? Will you get typecast and be forever doomed to a certain kind of role? For Christopher Lee, his career took him to heights he perhaps never anticipated; from a series of Hammer horror roles to Hollywood blockbusters, appearing in over 200 movies and over 60 television shows.
The actor made his first film appearance in Corridor of Mirrors in 1948, although it wasn’t until the late ‘50s that he began to receive more prominent acting jobs, landing the role of The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957. From there, he struck up a partnership with Hammer Film Productions, starring as many classic figures, such as Dracula, The Mummy, and even Grigori Rasputin.
The actor starred in many horror and thriller movies over the course of the next few decades, including some popular titles like The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man. As his star power increased, he could be seen in movies like The Man with the Golden Gun, eventually securing roles in major franchises like the Lord of the Rings, playing Saruman.
Lee might have had an impressive career in several hundred productions, working with everyone from George Lucas to Tim Burton, but there have been times when he was reluctant to perform certain roles. For example, when he was cast as the main character in 1964’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness, produced by Hammer, the dialogue for his part had him questioning whether he wanted to be in the movie.
Directed by Terence Fisher, who helmed many Hammer horrors, the movie wasn’t lauded as anything revolutionary, but it was an enjoyable movie nonetheless. Still, Lee initially had doubts about the script, telling an interviewer on NPR’s radio show Fresh Air, “I read the script, and I said, ‘I won’t say anything in this picture. I cannot possibly say these lines.’”
He continued, “They’re not only un-say-able, but they’ll have everybody rolling about for the wrong reasons. This is the difficulty of course, about making a film of this kind. You’re treading such a very, very narrow line between credibility and absurdity. If you slip on the wrong side, you’ve lost the audience and the picture’s dead.”
Luckily, the movie didn’t crash and burn like he thought it would. “It seems that over the years, we were able to maintain that credibility, and the audience – in the famous phrase – suspended its disbelief for an hour-and-a-half to two hours and accepted what we showed them.”
Still, Lee spoke about how playing such iconic and well-known characters was a hard task. “But they’re very difficult to play, these characters,” he continued, “obviously because they’re so outlandish. And they don’t exist – yet – and consequently, when I read this dialogue and read this script, I said to them, ‘oh, come on, you know, I’m not going to say any of these lines.’”
He added, “Can you imagine somebody in front of a camera actually saying, I am the apocalypse? Now, unless you’re making a religious picture or a picture like The Exorcist, this would sound ridiculous.”
