The vampire action flick Night Teeth is now streaming on Netflix. Its cast is led by Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Raúl Castillo, Debby Ryan, and Lucy Fry.
“To earn some extra cash, quirky college student Benny (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.) moonlights as a chauffeur for one night. His task: drive two mysterious young women (Debby Ryan and Lucy Fry) around Los Angeles for a night of party hopping,” says the official synopsis. “Taken captive by his clients’ charm, he soon learns that his passengers have their own plans for him – and an insatiable thirst for blood. As his night spins out of control, Benny is thrust into the middle of a clandestine war that pits rival tribes of vampires against the protectors of the human world, led by his brother (Raúl Castillo), who will stop at nothing to send them back into the shadows. With sunrise fast approaching, Benny is forced to choose between fear and temptation if he wants to stay alive and save the City of Angels.”
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ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Night Teeth stars Debby Ryan and Lucy Fry about their roles in the film, adding humanity to vampires, and more.
Tyler Treese: Debbie, yourself, and Jorge have such great chemistry in the film. Were you able to build that off-screen, or did it just click?
Debby Ryan: I think it just clicks. We’re both actors, and that was the job, but he’s also easy to get along with. That’s actually not true. No, he doesn’t give it away for free. So I think the amount of time that we spent together on set, we connected very well and we became friends, and we just found it. I think just the three of us spending so much time in that car. I think we all just got really close, and it was a lot of sort of like stunt training.
It was Mardi Gras, so we would all go out and watch a basketball game, or we would all sort of listen to music or be chilling and have meals. So I think the more that you were around people, the more you find of them. It was also really important to both of our characters that from the beginning, upon seeing each other, we connected in a way that was inspiring and challenged what we thought of our lives, our futures, and our relationships. So I think it was just sort of that was the work.
Lucy, you really get to go just all out in this role. How freeing was it just to be this wild and fun vampire?
Lucy Fry: Yeah, it was so much fun to have a character where it was like a green light for any direction almost. Adam was such a great director. In that to find her madness and her drive and her passion and her kind of ambition and her wild nature, Adam would say, “Okay, sometimes you’ve gotta take it as far as possible and just go all out, and then we can bring it back to find the ground underneath that.”
He just gave me full reign to kind of explore, and I’ve never played a character where I’ve had so much freedom to explore different aspects. I think it’s kind of almost ironic that it’s like a vampire was unhuman, like the undead thing, and that within that, I got to explore such a range of human experience of the playfulness, the love for Blaire, the jealousy, greed. Yeah, it was so much fun.
Debbie, going from Barney to being a vampire is quite the career arc. What did you find most interesting about Blaire, and what were you able to dig into this character?
Ryan: I mean, one of the most interesting things about her as she really came together was her humanity and her search for… When you’ve been around people who have watched people be born, live their entire life, and pass away for so long. I think it’s very lonely and it’s hard to connect with people. They’re also so much older than me. Blaire’s sort of the youngest vampire in her little group. So she still hasn’t lost it yet. She still has that little bit of life. I think that tension of her being surrounded by this world and that being her entire experience, but also having this thing that sort of still flickers and simmers inside of her, that’s just desperate to connect. It’s a really relatable but sort of complicated dynamic.
That was fun, and I wanted to fight. Both of us do martial arts. So I wanted to sort of fight and kick some ass, and I liked Adam’s vision. I thought that he not only had such a distinct vision from everything from how it would be shot and lit to edited, to sound and making playlists throughout it and knowing how things were gonna be edited but also just to have such an understanding and collaboration and us talking about the female experience and him creating so much space for us to inform it by what we know to be true and important to represent. I think that was why it felt so safe, and he’s just an amazing director, and I believed in him, and he made this movie.
