Reeves plays Jonathan with that innocent, faintly torpid calm which audiences would come to know and love for the next three decades. Hopkins is Professor Van Helsing, who is to school his young friends in the ways of vampire-killing: Hopkins has great fun with the black comic craziness of the role.
And it’s also notable for having a cast of male actors who could each quite plausibly play Dracula: Anthony Hopkins, Richard E Grant, Keanu Reeves, and Cary Elwes. This Dracula isn’t from Coppola’s great 70s/80s period, but it has a melodramatic and operatic energy and draws on the look and feel of Hollywood’s pre-Code salaciousness and the silent movie madness of Nosferatu – though the expressionist shadows are blood-red, not black. Dressed like the Pierrot from hell in his vast Transylvanian castle, Dracula then buys property in Victorian London, and appears there in the style of a sinister young dandy, on the scent of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: the winsome Mina (Ryder again), fiancee to the equally demure young lawyer who journeyed to Romania to draw up Dracula’s contracts: Jonathan, played by Keanu Reeves.
F rancis Ford Coppola’s vampire tale is now revived in cinemas for its 30th anniversary, with Gary Oldman the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess (played by Winona Ryder).
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