Nicolas Cage Shaved His Teeth Down To Play Dracula In Renfield

Nicolas Cage may have gone to drastic lengths to nail Dracula's iconic fanged look for "Renfield," but his dental work was actually just one step in an arduous, constantly evolving process of getting him into costume and ready to film. Dracula's visage morphs four times over the course of the film, and the makeup department engineered four separate processes for the character's different looks. According to Christien Tinsley, the first look took roughly three-and-a-half hours to apply to Cage each time. ""It was a full head of prosthetics, dentures, full body, torso, arms, hands and nails," the makeup artist said. "Those take time."

While the subsequent designs for Dracula at later stages of the movie didn't take as much time to apply, there was still a lot of effort involved in seeing Tinsley's creative vision for the character's look through. "There's a blue hue about him," he said. "It's very iridescent. If you see it in person, he almost looks like a metallic robot. I added a lot of teal iridescence to the makeup. In person, he would shimmer and shine, and on camera, it allows for a healthy glow to the skin, so he doesn't look like a cadaver."

Of course, when filming wrapped, Cage was able to remove most of the makeup and prosthetics and go back to his good old pre-Dracula appearance. There's no un-shaving those teeth, though.