Don’t tell anyone, but I think A Nightmare on Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp is psychic. We were talking on the phone about her experiences starring as Nancy in the horror franchise – she only just recently contributed to the new documentary Never Sleep Again – when I decided to shift gears and ask about one more movie, completely unrelated. And she knew, she just knew that I was talking about Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story before I even got the title out.
For those who don’t remember, Heather Langenkamp played that “other” Nancy, Olympian Nancy Kerrigan, in a TV movie about the Tonya Harding fiasco just months after the scandal hit the news. (Fellow ice skater Tonya Harding’s ex-husband conspired to assault her rival Kerrigan during the 1994 figure skating championships. It was in all the newspapers. Oh yeah, and remember newspapers?) Dear God, did Heather Langenkamp look the part, but the film itself has sunk into obscurity.
But for everyone who just wants to hear about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, we’ve got you covered too. We asked Heather Langenkamp about the original auditions, prom dress shopping with her on-screen mother Ronee Blakley, mentoring Johnny Depp on his first movie (sort of), the evolution of Nancy throughout the franchise and Wes Craven’s ballsy idea for the seventh movie, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
To find out more about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, you can watch the documentary Never Sleep Again, now available on DVD and Blu-ray. To find out more about Heather Langenkamp’s current projects, you can visit her personal website, IAmNancy.net.
[Spoiler Warning for most of the Nightmare franchise, which honestly you should have seen by now anyway.]
CraveOnline: Do you remember what scene you auditioned with for the original Nightmare on Elm Street?
Heather Langenkamp: Oh yes. I auditioned with a scene with Tina where we were sitting on the couch and I say something like, “That’s the guy that I dreamt about last night. He had these fingernails, or actually they were more like finger knives.” Yeah, that’s the one. And then I go “eeeeeeeeeeee” with my fingers, scraping the chalkboard. I think that’s why I got the job, because I actually put my hand up and I scraped my nails down the imaginary chalkboard. I think Wes thought that that was really cool. [Laughs]
So did you exit the audition thinking you’d nailed it?
Yeah, I mean he kind of told us. Amanda [Wyss] and I were sitting together in the audition, working the scene together, and he gave us some notes and we kind of got along. I could tell that she was going to be a good friend of mine for a long time if we ended up doing this movie, and of course we’re still friends today. I don’t know, we just clicked as girls and the scary moment with the finger knives, so he pretty much said that he loved us. I remember leaving feeling pretty positive, like I got it.
That’s what I was about ask. So many of the young cast members in this movie, it was their first project or their first feature film. Were you guys supporting each other, figuring things out as you went along? Was anyone mentoring you? John Saxon taking you aside, saying, “Okay, let me tell you how this works…”
[Laughs] Oh, I’m sure John Saxon thought we were all just ridiculous teenagers, but John of course was so experienced. He had really been part of the Hollywood studio system, so I was petrified of him because I did think that he probably was judging us quite harshly for techniques or being late or whatever, lack of professionalism. I’m always concerned that I’m insulting the elder statesmen on the set by my crass behavior. I always feel like we owe those folks so much respect. I was very afraid of John, and needlessly so, because he’s probably one of the sweetest men who ever walked Hollywood Blvd.
And then Ronee Blakley was also very worried about my relationship with her, because having a mother on screen is always tough. You want it to be just right, that relationship. So we went to the mall together to shop for a prom dress one day, which was really fun, just to get to know each other. And boy, I mean, she carried it to the nth degree. We went to the Galleria, which back then was like “the” mall in Los Angeles. So she would take me into stores and we would get into fights about the color, and she didn’t want me to wear strapless. We just had this great mother-daughter afternoon shopping for this imaginary prom dress and we really bonded that day. She just was a fantastic woman. She just was a fantastic woman who had so many Hollywood stories, and the Hollywood of the Seventies when everyone was kind of crazy. She’d just been hanging out with the coolest people like Bob Dylan and Wim Wenders, so I just sat and wanted to be her.
Then everyone else was pretty well established. And there’s me and Johnny [Depp], and I’m like, I’ve done maybe one or two little movies of the week and Johnny’s done nothing. He and I, we really felt like the newbies and I would give him little hints that I just learned the week before. I’d be like, “Johnny, that thing up there is the microphone!” [Laughs] Can you imagine how intimidating it was for him? So I pretended that I knew what I was doing and we all got alone just great.
Oh yeah, and there was Nick Corri, who now is called Jsu Garcia. I don’t know if he had had many parts before, but he was one of these kinds of kids who… I don’t want to say “living on the street,” but he was couch surfing, definitely. He was chasing his dream as well. All of us were. It was a time when you could kind of just come to Hollywood and sleep on your friend’s couch and then get a part in a big movie. It happened all the time.
