Flesh and Blood: An Exhaustive List of Actors who Have Portrayed Both Dracula and Van Helsing

Dracula ranks among Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, Jesus Christ, and Joan of Arc as one of film’s most enduring and adapted figures. First appearing onscreen in 1921 and basically annually since, I’ve lost count of how many faithful and unfaithful portrayals of the enigmatic Transylvanian devil I’ve consumed. 

From Universal monster to Hammer horror, highbrow to hardcore, you know Dracula will reappear until there’s no blood left to be drained from that IP (see: last year’s middling Curse of the Demeter, a fanfic-esque Rogue One-style adaptation of a single chapter from the Stoker novel’s second act). Like the mad impaler, audience interest in him seems to be immortal.

Dracula’s literary foe and prototypical demon slayer Professor Abraham Van Helsing has inspired his own fair share of iconic silver screen performances, though their successes are usually staked on the memorability of whichever movie’s opposing King Vamp. Still, the scrappy Dutch polymath plays no small part in the timeless monster mythology.

Few actors have the charisma, range, and meta-physicality required to capture the spellbinding horror of the evil eye itself AND the spell-breaking sensitivity of a self-assured bookworm.

What follows is an exhaustive list of the legendary performers who have brought Dracula and Van Helsing (back) to life on the silver screen:

1. Rutger Hauer

That’s it! 

As far as I can tell! I did not do exhaustive research beyond my own decades hunting down vampire movies to watch. You gotta hand it to the late great Hauer! The dual portrayals arrived relatively close together near the end of his considerable filmography. With 160 credits to his name, the character-actor certainly earned his devotees through sheer workmanlike commitment to cashing paychecks and chewing scenery.

Popularly known as the greatest Dutch actor of the 20th century, the polyglot jack of all trades is best known for his role as Roy Batty in Blade Runner, and is maybe the only performer to tackle these iconic gothic roles who actually spent some sea voyages aboard a freighter and studied medicine.

Speaking of the roles themselves: Each is the delirious centerpiece of very off-kilter adaptations of the characters. 

First, his Dracula: little more than a cameo in the third and final installment of Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000 trilogy, which becomes an Albert Pyun/John Ford style micro-epic before its conclusion. The third actor to tackle the role in as many movies, Hauer’s Dracula is a despotic parasocial media addict passively sucking blood through an IV and soaking up psychic energy. He rattles off monologues from the comfort of his castle and meets a quick demise in what must have been a short day’s work for the actor.

And then there’s his sleepwalking, slightly perturbed, and maybe visibly drunk turn as Van Helsing in the horror maestro Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D. A one-of-a-kind take on the world-weary and ever-ready professor, Hauer seems amused that anything around him is real or happening at all, which makes sense when one of those things is a 10-foot-tall hyperreal praying mantis. Reviled by most, the movie is nevertheless a pretty watchable and extra hornt-up 110 minutes that really sings in the $7M uncanny 3D valley, thanks largely to Hauer’s bravura anti-performance.

There you have it folks. Now, who’d I miss?

Bonus

Hugh Jackman starred as the new and improved, sexier, adventuring Van Helsing in the titular 2004 film, but is best known as Marvel’s Wolverine: the oft-bloodthirsty immortal with an animalistic sensuality and taste for taken women. Sound familiar? Jackman’s Bat-man was Richard Roxborough, who hasn’t played a corresponding Van Helsingian character to my knowledge, but did appear as a villainous sidekick in Mission: Impossible II with Interview with the Vampire’s Lestat (Tom Cruise). Bonus points: it also featured an uncredited Anthony Hopkins in a brief cameo.

Of course, Hopkins portrayed Van Helsing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but is even better known as pop culture’s other fiending and fiendishly seductive Eastern European aristocrat: Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who also literally feeds off the lifeforce of his victims. Coincidentally, Hopkins appeared with Van Helsing alum Hauer in The Rite.

Opposite Hopkins’ Van Helsing was the top-hatted shapeshifting vamp Gary Oldman, who remains best known for his villainous roles such as Zorg, Stansfield, Dr. Zachary Smith, Lord Shen, the Devil, and Winston Churchill. He did play a resourceful, academic protagonist in the form of literary icon George Smiley, which is some nerdy British spy stuff I know nothing about. (He also worked with Hauer on Surviving the Game.)

In Brit shit I do know about: Christopher Lee, maybe cinema’s most storied Dracula (be they Vlads, Regulas, Orlocks, or Karnsteins) and Hammer’s go-to Karloffian monster, once portrayed a monster-hunter! Lee started as a parapsychic brain physician named Dr. Namaroff in a sorta-knockoff Dracula horror called The Gorgon. Plus, Lee did Sherlock Holmes once.

Peter Cushing, the Van Helsing to Lee’s Drac, though typecast in Hammer films and beyond as a rational-minded monster-destroyer, ghoulishly appeared as an undead digital double in the tasteless posthumous reprise of his role as General Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Rogue One. In space, we’re all children of the night. Cushing has also starred as Sherlock Holmes.

Finally, it must be said that Hauer not only portrayed Dracula and Van Helsing, but also vampires in two movies starring Donald Sutherland: Lothos the Vampire Slayer-Slayer in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kurt Barlow in Salem’s Lot.

Thanks for reading (and if you haven’t, please read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or better yet, Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian proto-Dracula novella, Carmilla). I hope this provided a brief distraction from the real world horrors we have a duty to confront. Bless you all and hang on to each other.

Rest in peace, Rutger Hauer.