If you grew up in the early '90s, there's a good chance that you'll know who Freddy Krueger is.
Freddy Krueger was first introduced in Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street, which starred a very young Johnny Depp in his feature film debut, and spawned a total of eight films and a recent remake in 2010.
He's an iconic figure in horror, up there with the likes of Michael Myers from Halloween or Jason Voorhees from Friday The 13th, and has been played by one person throughout - Robert Englund. He's now recognised as only one of two actors to play a horror character eight times, the other being Doug Bradley - who played the Pinhead from the Hellraiser series.
In a recent interview with EW, Englund, who turned 70 this year, admitted that his time was up as Freddy Krueger - as he's now "too old" to continue playing the character as his body simply can't take the punishment any more. "If I do a fight scene now it’s got to be real minimal because I can’t snap my head for eight different takes and different angles. My spine gets sore. I can still be mean and scary, but I’m mostly relegated now to sort of Van Helsing roles, old doctors and shit."
Speaking of fight scenes, his last appearance as the character was in 2003's crossover hit, Freddy Vs. Jason, where the two characters finally met face-to-face for the first time. Englund goes on, saying that he "had a good run" as Krueger.
"And no one plans for this in your career. When I was wearing tights and doing Shakespeare, I didn’t say I wanted to be famous for playing this boogeyman. Careers happen and one of the pieces of advice I give to people is I’m sure you’ll do a great pilot or you’ll do a little independent art movie and it won’t go anywhere and then you might do your Intern No. 3 on Grey’s Anatomy and that’s the one that becomes the huge hit. People just don’t know. And when you’ve survived as long as I have and you see that, you can be real happy that you got 20 years as Freddy Kruger, you know?"
Via EW