Robert Englund is one of the horror genre’s most iconic actors. Aside from being the face of Freddy Krueger in nearly every incarnation of the franchise since it was first conceived in 1984 – he’s played a vast amount of horror characters both good and bad. Now he’s taking the part of host for the Travel Channel’s upcoming series True Terror with Robert Englund. And while promoting the series, he took the time to explain one of his biggest phobias. As it turns out, Robert Englund has a massive fear of snakes – and the reasoning is quite interesting.
Here’s what Robert Englund had to say regarding his fear of snakes, as taken via ComicBook:
“I did this movie called ‘Python,’ which was the low-budget follow-up to Anaconda with Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez. And it was one of those direct-to-DVD horror movies, science-fiction movies. Casper [Van Dien] was doing a lot of those because he was such a big success with Starship Troopers. And they gave me a baby python, an albino baby python in that movie for my character. I was the herpetologist who was an expert on snakes. And they actually put a shoestring through a tube sock and put the little female python, albino white python, little tiny python around my shoulder. They tied it around my shoulder and let the tube sock hang in my armpit.
And then I would pull her out, and she would coil around my fingers and coil around my wrist and hand and do scenes. I knew it looked cool on camera, I’ve got this live snake coiling around, this little, thin baby white python. And that’s how I got over my fear of snakes because the snake was so small. She’s not venomous. I worked with her for six weeks on the movie, and she was in my armpit for five of those weeks. That’s the irony of being a horror movie actor is the horror movie actor got over his fear of snakes doing a horror movie about snakes.”
It’s definitely an interesting story, and one that has quite a happy ending considering the production of Python was enough for Robert Englund to get over his fears. When you consider that he befriended a sweet baby python, it’s nice to see that Robert Englund has a heart of gold; even when it comes to things that others – including himself at one point – are usually afraid of.
Meanwhile if fans are still eager for more Robert Englund, they can now tune into True Terror with Robert Englund on the Travel Channel.