The British Star Who Nearly Became Freddy Krueger—And What Made Him Walk Away.
Before Robert Englund slithered into Freddy Krueger’s striped sweater and burned his way into horror legend, the role was, surprisingly, almost someone else’s nightmare—David Warner’s. Yeah, that British guy with a resume full of twisted henchmen and creepy characters was originally pegged to haunt our dreams as the sinister Freddy. You might think casting a nightmare isn’t a big deal, but turns out, the story behind who almost became the claw-handed terror is all kinds of messy. So how does an Emmy-winning actor known for playing both Nazis and Roman schemers end up getting nudged out of horror history? And why does pepperoni pizza have a say in Freddy’s final look? Let’s peel back the layers of this Hollywood horror casting saga—it’s not just what you think, and it’s way more interesting than just a scheduling conflict. LEARN MORE.
Before Robert Englund put on the striped sweater, the part of Freddy Krueger belonged, by most accounts, to David Warner.
The British actor already had a résumé full of villains by 1984: he’d been Jack the Ripper in Time After Time, Evil himself in Time Bandits, and the tyrannical Sark in Tron, and he’d won an Emmy in 1981 for playing the Roman schemer Pomponius Falco in the miniseries Masada, three years after an Emmy nomination for playing the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich in Holocaust. Mental Floss has mentioned the near-miss before, and the usual version goes like this: director Wes Craven cast Warner, Warner sat for makeup tests, and a scheduling conflict forced him out before cameras rolled on A Nightmare on Elm Street. But it’s messier than that.
Who Craven Saw
Finding Freddy wasn’t easy, because Craven himself wasn’t sure what he wanted. “I looked at hundreds of guys and a lot of old men. I wanted somebody that was very agile,” he said in a 1988 book about the series, Nightmares on Elm Street: The Freddy Krueger story; he wanted “somebody who was an actor rather than a stuntman.” One of the people he talked to was Kane Hodder, the stuntman who later played Jason Voorhees in four Friday the 13th movies and has severe burn scars from a 1977 stunt that went wrong. “I was sitting on the set of Hills Have Eyes II with Wes [and] we were talking about my burn scars,” Hodder recalled in 2020, adding that “it was just strange to have talked to Wes about that before it ever happened.”
Englund got in the door through casting director Annette Benson, who had watched him test for every role in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and lose them all. “I think they wanted a big, giant man originally, but she talked Wes … into seeing me,” he said in the same 1988 book. He was between the V miniseries and the V TV show at the time, and he later told Vulture that “the only job I auditioned for that fit my schedule was Nightmare on Elm Street. That’s the real reason I said yes.” Craven was sold: “Everyone was too quiet, too compassionate towards children. Then Robert Englund auditioned.”
The Missing Paper Trail
Warner’s name doesn’t come up anywhere in Craven’s 1988 account of the search, or in Craven’s and Englund’s recollections for Vulture’s 2014 oral history of the film. Retellings often point to the 2010 documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and its companion book, and the famous photo of Warner in Freddy makeup is shakier. In October 2015, Bloody Disgusting ran makeup artist David B. Miller’s early test photos with permission from the book’s author, Thommy Hutson, and described them as Miller “testing various concepts for Robert Englund’s Freddy makeup.”
When Dread Central picked up the same photos, it said Miller had tested the concepts on Warner. As for the look that made it to the screen, Miller credited an unlikely source: “The final design for Freddy that went through, and this is a true story, is pepperoni pizza.”
Warner never played Freddy, but he did end up in a Wes Craven horror movie, playing Sidney’s drama teacher in Scream 2 in 1997. He died in July 2022, at 80.
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