Jakob’s Wife interview with Barbara Crampton

Barbara Crampton is an actress that needs little introduction for those that appreciate classic horror. After making her mark with appearances in iconic films like Re-Animator, From Beyond and Chopping Mall, followed by a string of appearances in films of various genres. After a period of quiet, Barbara’s career had a resurgence in 2011 with a role in Adam Wingard’s critically acclaimed thriller, You’re Next. Since then she has been putting in the hours, appearing in more than 20 films and shows and proving herself to be far more than your typical eighties scream queen.

This week, her latest release, Jakob’s Wife hits our screens courtesy of Shudder. In the film, Barbara plays Anne Fedder, a woman leading an unexciting life in a lacking relationship.

But a chance encounter with a vampire changes everything for Anne. As she slowly transforms into a creature of the night, she is re-energised and undergoes a metamorphasis. Before long she finds she must choose between the man she loves and her second youth, then face her toughest battle – to win back the things she cares about most.

Barbara Crampton interview

Barabara is one actress we have been eager to speak to at Love Horror. Last week, we were lucky enough to get some time with her to talk about Jakob’s Wife and her career to-date. And boy did time fly!

How did this tale of a cannibalistic heroine come about?

The script won a contest at Shriekfest in 2015. It was originally written by Mark Steensland and he and Denise Gossett, who’s the director of Shriekfest. They reached out to me because they thought it would be a good vehicle for me as an actor, and I had just started producing at the time – I produced Beyond the Gates. And I had been working on another film that’s still in development with another company to try and get off the ground.

When the script for Jakob’s Wife came to me I just really fell in love with it. Initially it was told through the eyes of Jakob and how he would deal with somebody who was bitten by a vampire and how he would help somebody through a terminal illness. That was the sort of metaphor rather than the metaphor of women empowerment or feminism – that idea wasn’t really there. And we decided to change that lens and make it more of a feminist film and a movie about a marriage… And how you would keep a marriage going during in a crisis

Soon I was just really attracted to the story of this woman and what she goes through in her awakening to herself and her self-awareness. And after a couple of different rewrites with a few different people, Travis Stevens came on board to direct it.

I loved the links to classic films like Salem’s Lot, Nosferatu and The Lost Boys…

We talked about our favorite vampire movies – like what were the things that we love about all the different vampire movies that we’ve seen, and Salem’s Lot came up of course, because that’s probably my all-time favorite or one of them. And also, Near Dark was another one.

With a subgenre like the vampire movie, which has been so popular, was it hard to produce ideas that are fresh and keep the audience interested?

Travis wanted to come up with certain scenes in the movie that would be memorable and different from what people have seen before. But we also wanted give the fans a little bit of the colourations of some of their favorite vampire movies. We didn’t want it to feel like Jakob had to save Anne from anything, because that’s seen in films like in Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and a lot of the earlier ones… Where a woman gets bitten by vampire and the man has to save her.

But in Jakob’s Wife, when my character, Anne gets bitten by the vampire, the whole world changes. It gets funnier, the movie gets funnier, it gets more colourful.

And the message is to embrace all of that. You know, just life is messy. Life is strange and to not be so comfortable. Anne is just so comfortable in the life that she’s been in and she doesn’t quite know how to break out of it. It takes this crisis happening of being bitten by a vampire for her world to open up. For her to embrace another aspect of herself.

Your performance in Jakob’s Wife was your strongest to date and I feel it was probably down to the fact that you played that perfect balance of gravitas and comedy. What would you say are the key elements that have helped you fine-tune your acting skills?

I appreciate you saying that, and I do feel like for me, I felt good about my work in it.

I was so close to the project and had been working on it for four years, so that really helped. Sometimes I’ll get a part and then start filming it a week later and I don’t get a lot of time to really talk to the other people in the movie or the director, and I show up on set and I just do my part.

In this film, because we had worked on it for so long, I felt like I lived that character. I do feel like the character was relatable to my own life. I have been married for 20 years and sort of had a second round of my career when I came back with You’re Next a few years ago, after really not doing anything for a number of years because I just wasn’t getting the calls for acting jobs.

And then I came back and I rediscovered my love for acting and working in the business. So, I think I’m very close to the character and I just really loved the material and I love all the people that I worked with.

I think Larry is a fantastic actor and I thought Travis did a great job. You know he’s been on sets his whole life. And we took our time with one another for this film. Usually, when you’re making a movie, it’s fast, but we took our time over a number of years to develop this material.

We rehearsed a little bit on Zoom and Skype calls. And you don’t often get to do that. When I worked on Re-Animator we rehearsed that movie for three weeks before we shot it because Stuart Gordon came from the theater, and I thought that was how all movies were going to be going forward. But actually, that was just one of the few movies I’ve ever rehearsed, and I think the more time you spend with the character the more helpful it is in your performance.

Now you are getting calls for work more regularly and therefore have to turn down a lot of scripts/ideas. With your experience now, what qualities is it that stand out in an idea that would make it more likely to interest you?

If I feel like I’m connecting with the director and what they’re trying to say with a movie, and if I believe in them, if I’ve seen their work before and then I’ll say ‘yes, I want to work with that film maker’ and if the movie has something to say, or if I feel like I can add value with a certain character, I’ll say ‘yes’.

Sometimes I get offered roles and I don’t know what my purpose is for being in the movie. Maybe they just want Barbara Crampton in the movie, but at times, I don’t connect with the character. I don’t see the value in me playing that part. And if anybody could play it, I probably won’t do it.

Recently I did a movie with Brandon Christianson who worked on Z and Stillborn, and I really liked both of those movies very much. So he called me up with a small role in a new movie called Super Host and it has a really good beginning, middle and end. And as I really liked his other movies, I read the script and I said ‘yes’ almost immediately because I really trusted him.

I also did a movie with Ricky Bates Junior who directed Excision and Trash Fire called King Knight and I love him and I love his movies – I just think he’s such a talented person with his own distinct point of view.

Basically, he called me up and said, ‘oh, I have a part in this movie and I’d really like you to consider it’ and in my mind I was saying ‘yes’ even before I read it because like he’s such a good filmmaker.