‘Dracula’ star Claes Bang had trouble saying the letter ‘S’ when he was wearing his fangs.
The 52-year-old Danish actor is portraying the titular vampire in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ new BBC adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel but he admits it took him some time to get used to his terrifying teeth when he had them in and he had to practice for hours to be able to speak all of his lines.
Speaking to BANG Showbiz and other media, Claes shared: "I had a little bit of a problem with saying ‘S’ in the beginning, when I was doing ‘The Affair’ I had some practice fangs.
"The guy that did them was the most amazing. It was really really cool."
Claes also revealed that his fangs were modelled on his own teeth and unlike the slender fangs that Dracula often had in the Universal Monster movies and the Hammer horror films the makers wanted the blood-thirsty Count to have teeth like a carnivore.
He explained: "My fangs are actually sort of my teeth enlarged a little bit.
"They took a print of my teeth and then they just came back with them just slightly bigger. They’ve done them quite sort of carnivore. It’s like they’re quite predator … They’re not really lovely and long and white. They’re sort of not very nice looking."
Speaking about the importance of the fangs to the character in his three-part horror drama, ‘Sherlock’ co-creator Moffat added: "His fangs become visible, our Dracula’s fangs become most visible when he smiles. And that sort of sums up our Dracula, because he does smile. He has quite interesting chats with people before he offs them. So, it’s really taking on board the fact that Dracula, before he was vampired, was a highly accomplished, very educated prince."
Claes was gifted a model of his fangs by the special effects team as a memento from his work on the show.
He spilled: "I didn’t get to keep them, but do you know what they did? The people that did them, they did a very nice little model of it that I could take home. So I’ve got that. It’s the cast, they built it into something."
‘Dracula’ continues on BBC One at 9pm on Thursday (02.01.20).
Claes Bang had some fang trouble on Dracula set
