UGO: You have previous vampire movie experience. I understand you used a certain type of sword to stab a topless girl in The Thirst.

NEIL: Yeah, my character Duke in The Thirst was turned in the 18th Century so he has that Dickensian decadence to him. He has a walking cane so he looks very unassuming. But the cane doubles as a sword, he unscrews it and manages to do some nasty work cutting up a few people and creating some lunch for himself.

UGO: How was working with director Jeremy Kasten on The Thirst?

NEIL: Good. Duke was a smaller character. I did two weeks work on the shoot and it was only a six week shoot. He cast me based on a conversation we had. I came in with some ideas.

UGO: Apparently you wear rouge in the film.

NEIL: Since he is from the turn of the 18th century he is very much a fop but they wanted him slightly schizophrenic. So we tossed around a bunch of ideas and I said, “Well, it would be really nice to have that dichotomy of the fact that he was an 18th century gent. The folks at the time had these very pasty faces and they applied rouge to their cheeks. Their teeth were very ugly and messed up because they didn’t have the dental stuff that we have. So where would you get rouge? Where better than from blood? So every kill he applies more rouge to his cheeks. We tried to make it as fun as possible, yet still keep those elements of historical accuracy in them.

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