You'd have to be brain un-dead to not know the sort of indelible impression Bela Lugosi made on cinema, if not pop culture as a whole, with the 1931 Universal Monster movie classic "Dracula."

In fact, he's so much at the forefront of people's minds still today, that every time anyone tries to imitate a vampire, they ultimately slip into Lugosi's distinct Hungarian accent. I mean, try it. Try to say, "I want to suck your blood" or "Children of the night -- oh what music they make" without falling completely into Lugosi-speak.

Luckily, we can just laugh off our failed attempts of being winged creatures of the night. But the same can't be said for actor Richard Roxburgh.

Roxburgh plays the time-honored role of Count Dracula in "Van Helsing," the hotly anticipated adventure horror thriller from "The Mummy" writer and director Stephen Sommers. And while Sommers has a deft touch when it comes to adding lighthearted moments in his monster movies, at the end of the day, they're not comedy pieces.

So, needless to say, the delivery of the dialogue had to be -- for lack of a better word -- dead-on.

"It was a trap and it had to be dealt with very early on in the piece and, luckily, we were blessed with a dialect coach who had a colossal ear," Roxburgh told me in a recent @ The Movies interview. "I was very determined, as were all of the actors who were playing Transylvanians, to make sure that didn't go into that terrible accent route."

The key to avoid to sounding silly, Roxburgh said, was to practice the lines as if you were honing foreign language skills.

"You have to first break the words down into phonetics and work it out from there. You avoid going over the speed hump of Bela Lugosi that way. At the end of that path lies the Count from Sesame Street," Roxburgh said with a laugh. "You don't want to go there."

That's not to say Roxburgh doesn't admire Lugosi. It's just that with "Van Helsing," the objective wasn't to channel Lugosi or remake the original classic, but to make the character his own.

And in this film, he has good company. He has Frankenstein's Monster (Shuler Hensley) and the Wolfman (Will Kemp), and they're all being tracked down by the vampire slayer Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) and his equally tough counterpart Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale). Roxburgh's Dracula is their main adversary.

"I think we moved quite a long ways away from Bela's Dracula," Roxburgh observed. "There have been a lot of Draculas over the years and a lot of really fine ones. I loved Klaus Kinski's "Nosferatu" -- I absolutely loved the strangeness of it. So the character is open to an enormous amount of interpretation."

Anybody who has seen Sommers' "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" knows very well that the filmmaker has a very powerful re-imagination to expand boundaries with his keen sensibilities: In short, Sommers knows how to capture the essence of the classics yet give his films a contemporary feel.

"We interpreted things in a way that might be more interesting to a contemporary audiences," Roxburgh, who has also starred in such films as "Moulin Rouge" and "Mission: Impossible 2." "Steve has exposed audiences to computer-generated imagery of a very high standard now, so it was a lot of fun to play with."

Part of the reason it was fun for Roxburgh was that, unlike Hensley and the actor's Frankenstein Monster, he didn't have to undergo four hours in morning makeup sessions to turn into the Hellbeast version of Dracula. Instead, it was left up to the film's CGI wizards to figure out.

"I can't tell you, having latex work before, having labored under layer upon layer of latex after four hours of application in the early, early morning - what a relief it was not have to go through that," Roxburgh mused. "There's this thing that I've actually started to define as prosthetic depression: it occurs when a makeup artist finishes his or her makeup work on your face in the morning and walks away. You fall into an immediate slump knowing for the next 10 hours that you're in it."

The Humanity Of Dracula

Anyone who has followed the cinematic history of the Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster and Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolfman knows that the characters possessed incredibly tragic qualities.

And while Dracula has been portrayed over the years as much more evil, Roxburgh hopes to change the perception of the character a bit with "Van Helsing" -- a character that was once human, instead of always known as "the undead."

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"What I really hoped to bring to this particular interpretation was a sense of a kind of faded humanity in a sense of what he once was as a man: as a commander of men -- a formidable person," Roxburgh explained. "But he's also a person who has allowed himself through making a pact with the devil, he's found himself in a real treacherous situation until the end of time. There is something that's intrinsically tragic about that. He's somebody that's incredibly frustrated and full of world-weariness."

Fortunately, Roxburgh won't face the same lifetime of emptiness off the set. That's because he developed a relationship with one of his cast members -- Italian beauty Silvia Colloca -- near the end of filming.

What makes it more unusual is that Colloca plays Verona, one of Dracula's three brides. Josie Maran (Marishka) and Elena Anaya (Aleera) round out the Count's trio of "drop un-dead gorgeous" beauties.

"In fact, we hardly worked together," Roxburgh said. "We met at the first read-through and saw very little of one another. She disappeared to Italy -- and when she was working, I wasn't working -- so we actually never worked together until quite late in the piece in Los Angeles, after the Prague shoot was completed. It was only then that we started to fall in love."

Now, I've never been the type of interviewer to pry into performer's personal business, but I told Roxburgh that I couldn't help but think the other brides got jealous.

"Well it was interesting at an interview today when someone asked me in front of all of us, 'Why did you pick the Italian bride?' Josie Maran said, 'Because she was single,'" Roxburgh recalled, laughing. "I think they're all happy for us and they'll all be at the wedding."

While it's unlikely that they'll be wearing their "Van Helsing" costumes, their wedding next fall in Tuscany will be reminiscent of the film, in a way.

"We are actually doing it in a castle -- but we intend to try and keep some distance between this castle and what happens in Dracula's castle," laughed Roxburgh.

More Info:
Official 'Van Helsing' Movie Web Site