'Last Voyage of the Demeter' Director on Javier Botet's Dracula Performance

The Big Picture

• Javier Botet is known for his ability to portray monstrous creatures, and he impressed director André Øvredal with his unique performance as Dracula.
• The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a film based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker's Dracula .
• The film features an excellent cast including Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, Aisling Franciosi, and David Dastmalchian, and is now playing in theaters.

There are few character actors around with the uncanny ability to play monstrous creatures quite like Javier Botet. The horror movie icon has embodied so many iconic monsters from a Xenomorph in Alien: Covenant to the Slender Man in Slender Man. Now, he's playing Dracula with The Last Voyage of the Demeter under director André Øvredal. Ahead of the film's release, Øvredal spoke with Collider's Perri Nemiroff about Botet and how he always manages to leave the director in awe.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter isn't Botet and Øvredal's maiden voyage together. The two previously collaborated on Øvredal's 2019 adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark where the actor played the nightmarish corpse from "The Big Toe" in a brief but memorable appearance. Landing Botet to play the prototypical vampire cemented that this film was going to be in stark contrast to what Bram Stoker depicted in Dracula. Gone is the charismatic yet manipulative vampire and in steps a horrifying creature of the night with a more feral and twitchy body language as it slinks through the shadows of the Demeter and picks off its crew members.

Øvredal had nothing but praise for Botet's work, specifically highlighting how he manages to keep finding new ways to impress with his body language:

"He's such a character actor. He really thinks like the creature, he really puts himself in the spot of the person he is, the mentality. Whether it's very animalistic or it's very intelligent, he's able to portray all these things. And he has a body language that is so unique that you can't really predict, and he could come up with suggestions for how to portray this moment or that moment, in just the details of how he uses his fingers or how he moves his body. It's just kind of all these things. Even though you've seen him do things before, and I’ve worked with him before, he always surprises."

Botet's Dracula Is the Real Star of The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Paired with excellent prosthetics to look the part, Botet has appeared absolutely terrifying in the images and footage revealed so far. He's set to terrify audiences in this Alien-like film which is ripped straight from the pages of Stoker's Dracula. Based on a single chapter in the book, the film depicts Dracula's voyage from Carpathia to London aboard the titular merchant ship which would end its journey with only its captain remaining. Botet will have some excellent victims to bite into along the way, including Corey Hawkins, Liam Cunningham, Aisling Franciosi, and David Dastmalchian with Jon Jon Briones, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Woody Norman, Martin Furulund, Nicolo Pasetti, and Chris Walley rounding out the cast.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is now playing in theaters. Check out the trailer below as well as our full interview with Øvredal here on Collider.

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