Saturday evening at last weekend’s Terror Con in Marlborough, MA, was capped off by a highlight of the event: a panel with Robert Englund. No one can work a room quite like the loquacious horror icon, and he regaled the standing-room-only crowd with 45 minutes of tales from his storied career.

Although it was advertised as Englund interviewing the audience — which could have been an entertaining way to avoid any potential issues with the SAG-AFTRA strike — the crowd was perfectly happy to learn that it would be a standard question-and-answer session instead. Englund began by explaining that the strike prohibits promotion of his work and any discussions about upcoming projects before quipping, “And if anybody asks how long the Freddy makeup takes, I’ll castrate you.” The audience erupted in laughter and cheers.

“I am, to this day, the luckiest son of a bitch in Hollywood,” he said of stumbling into his role as Freddy Krueger. “I’m what’s known as a character actor, and I began playing sidekicks in the 1970s. Burt Reynolds, Jan Michael Vincent, Peter Strauss; I was their best friend, the buddy, the pal, the sidekick. In the old days, in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, the big stars’ sidekicks could be played by old men, but they began to get younger and younger, so I would have aged out of those roles, even though I sidekicked all the big stars in the ’70s. That’s where I fit back then. I’m so grateful that I stumbled into the horror genre.

“I had buried my childhood love of the genre underneath loads and loads of ego and classical training and theater work. I had become kind of a snob, even though as I child I used to mow lawns to go see Forbidden Planet and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The giant squid, come on! I saw it in VistaVision at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was a fanboy, and I buried all that stuff, and my love of Hammer Films, because I was a [in Shakespearean accent] classically trained actor doing Shakespeare and the avant-garde! I was that idiot for a while. I was full of myself. And Wes Craven, God rest his soul, taught me to respect the genre again.”

Englund detailed his complicated feelings while shooting the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. “Those were awkward sequences for me, because Freddy had so many abilities in the landscape of the nightmare. He’s got all these gifts. He’s like a Marvel villain, and I still have to wrestle around with these teenage brats. Of course, Heather [Langenkamp] and all of them give as good as they get, but it’s just awkward. It’s like, ‘Why can’t I just obliterate them right now with my thought process?’ It’s always tricky, so you have to find a way to make that make sense to you.”

When asked about his favorite death scene in the Elm Street franchise, Englund responded, “My favorite Freddy kill, viewing it, is probably Tina getting dragged across the ceiling [in the original] and the politically incorrect boy with the hearing aid [in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare]. I think special needs people can die bad too! Let them get out there and play bad guys and victims too. You don’t have to make everyone a saint. It gets kind of boring.”

Englund signs tattoos for free, thanks to his unlikely first encounter with Freddy ink shortly after the release of the first Elm Street. “In 1984, I was still promoting V, and I went to do a Thanksgiving Day parade in Sacramento, California. I’m there in my goddamn bow tie and my leftover ’70s perm. I’m on a float, and I’m doing the queen wave. I’ve done this publicity thing that I owed to NBC for V, and my wife and I are going to the wine country in Northern California for Thanksgiving.

“A guy pulls up on a Harley, blond hair down to his ass, tats all over him. He gets off, he pulls his jeans down to his knees, takes his shirt off, and he goes, ‘Mr. Englund, look!” It was a Japanese mafia tattoo of Freddy and Jason sumo wrestling! So I appreciate ink.”

Englund is proud to be an action figure. “The thing about action figures is you sort of want to collect them. Way back deep in our brain we all have that man cave, that cool bedroom. I don’t horde them or anything like that, but I’ve got some rare ones. I would wager a bet that during COVID all of the artists that do posters and graphic novels and action figures — all the stuff that we love — I think they were busy little bees. I’m still catching up with all the new stuff that I see. Every con I see 20 things I’ve never seen before, let alone really rare oldies but goodies.

“There’s one of Freddy as the doctor, but the illustrator on the back has become my new favorite illustrator. That artwork should be sold independently, because I’ll buy one. They’re that cool. They’re not cartoon, not graphic novel; they’re right in between. This artist has channeled my body language into an illustration. I like the style. It’s a little bit Mad Magazine.” (He seems to be referring to Nathan Thomas Milliner, whose art accompanies NECA’s Surgeon Freddy figure from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4.)

Before donning the Freddy makeup, Englund had his breakthrough as resistance fighter Willie in the 1983 miniseries V. “Extremes are much easier to play than the middle. Nothing is harder to play than the heroes and heroines. Romeo is the hard part to play, not Hamlet. You can chew up Hamlet. Romeo is difficult; you’ve got to figure it out. I got lucky. The entire world saw me playing a sweet, damaged alien-person who meant well but got sent to the wrong place in America with his invading army.

“The only reason I made that role work is the great [V creator] Kenneth Johnson. When I auditioned, I had no clue. I said, ‘Sir, I’m an alien and I’m a malaprop. I learned the wrong language and I’ve been sent to LA. I make all these mistakes. What do you see?’ He goes, ‘Two words, Robert: Gene Wilder.’ How great is that coming from someone as famous and as powerful as Kenneth Johnson? So I just channeled Gene Wilder through Robert Englund and stuff that I had done earlier in my career. That’s how I found Willie.”

A gamer asked Englund about working on Call of the Dead, the star-studded, zombie-focused Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC. “Call of the Dead overpaid all of us. We all had to wear black tights and black turtlenecks with all these white ping-pong balls stapled to our nipples and our butts for 360-degree image capture. You learn to act where the camera is.”

He continued, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah [Michelle Gellar], had just had a baby. So beautiful. She goes to her trailer for lunch. So here’s the table for lunch: Michael Rooker, Danny Trejo, George Romero, Robert Englund. All of have little middle-aged bellies, all of us like a free meal, and all of us look ridiculous in black tights.”

A question about Englund’s little-seen Jack Ketchum adaptation, Red, sparked his appreciation for star Brian Cox. “Brian Cox, the original fucking Hannibal Lecter. Manhunter, wow! Stephen Lang rolling down a parking garage in a wheelchair on fire scared the shit out of this cowboy.

“I got to work with Brian Cox on Red, and I got to hangout with him at Sundance. At 9 in the morning, he bought me a Bushmills [whiskey]. You know why? He was doing the most complicated Tom Stoppard play ever called Rock ‘n’ Roll on Broadway. He was so glad. I literally watched him hang up on his understudy who’s having a nervous breakdown because the guy had so much dialogue. It’s like memorizing The Bible, and Brian Cox aced it. I got to hang out with Brian Cox, and that made my day.”

When pressed about his favorite horror movie, Englund couldn’t name just one. “It changes with me. I’m gonna just throw out a bunch of them. Anya Taylor Joy in The Witch. Get Out. Swedish Let the Right One In. Rosemary’s Baby really holds up. You can watch it for Mia Farrow and you can watch it for John Cassavetes; just their performances, let alone the direction. There’s some great, interesting stuff in that movie. And, of course, Ruth Gordon as the oldest witch. Please don’t ever drink her drink. Obviously, The Exorcist. Silence of the Lambs.

Each title was greeted by applause, but he didn’t stop there. “I love Brian De Palma’s Sisters, a great, great film. The best split screen in the history of movies. Margot Kidder, William Finley — my favorite mad doctor ever. He cuts two girls in half because he wants to make love to one of them. How nasty and crazy is that?! William Finley, great actor. He’s also in The Fury, and he’s also in my low-rent Tobe Hooper movie, Eaten Alive. I love Bride of Frankenstein. Angela Bettis in May. You should all watch May this Halloween. Underrated, great, nasty film.”

Englund lamented that he’s too old for the one role he always wanted to play. “I aged out of Iago from Othello. I understudied and I never got on. I got on in rehearsals. I had it figured out, because I had to watch it so much as an understudy. The great actor playing Othello was Roger Robinson. He was in the seminal pilot for Kojak called The Marcus-Nelson Murders. Roger got a Tony Award on Broadway for an August Wilson play [Joe Turner’s Come and Gone]. I never got to go on.”

He’d like to reprise his role as Victor Creel in Stranger Things’ upcoming final season. “In Stranger Things Season 4, there’s a sequence with Natalia [Dyer] walking through a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street dreamscape. I heard the voice over from Vecna, my boy. Vecna says, ‘Ah, old Victor. I remember him well. Perhaps I should pay him a visit.’ So they have an option in Season 5 of either killing me on-screen or just telling the audience that Vecna killed me. They did bring it up, but there’s a lot of stuff they have to wrap up. It would be fun for me to do that.”

Although the strike precluded him from discussing it, Englund also teased a project he was offered earlier this year. “It’s a great serial killer script. The strike killed the financing, but I hope it comes to fruition. To me, it’s A-list even though it’s medium-low budget. I really want to do it, because I really think it’s smart. It’s the best script I’ve had, probably, in 6 to 10 years.”

Englund waxed poetic about the short-lived Nightmare Cafe, Wes Craven’s Twilight Zone-esque anthology than ran for six episodes in 1992. “Nightmare Cafe, why isn’t that show still on? You know those shows that were so great that get cancelled too soon? They left money on the table. Jack Coleman, Lindsay Frost, and Wes Craven, and myself and my wife and my dog all went up to Vancouver, Canada, and did that show.

“We were so proud of it, but it was ahead of its time. Every episode was its on identity. The only thing linking them was somewhere in America there was a diner that served as a kind of purgatory for those passing through; those going up and those going down. And you got a last wish to make something right. You didn’t get to live, but you’d get to fix something. I worked with Angela Bassett. I worked with the most extraordinary guest stars on that show.”

Nightmare Cafe also yielded Englund’s favorite Wes Craven memory. “Wes Craven, Robert Englund, Jack Coleman drinking really good red wine. We’re in British Columbia, so we get really good imports from France. We’re watching Saturday Night Live, and it’s the ‘Head Wound Harry’ sketch with Dana Carvey. Look it up! It’s the epitome of great black humor, and black humor’s the most difficult thing to do. Wes Craven and Jack Coleman, who were both 6’2”, are laughing so hard with their long, skinny legs and their red wine inebriation, they’re almost peeing their pants and they almost kicked over my coffee table.

“And that’s when I knew Wes had stopped being my boss and had become my friend.”

To learn more about Englund’s life and career, don’t miss the now-streaming SCREAMBOX Original documentary Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story.