Alex Winter Talks Becoming a Horrifying Ogre, ‘Bill & Ted 4,’ and Breaking Up Big Tech

Back in the days of Blockbuster and local video rental stores, there was always that one rack — the one packed with horror flicks with gory-looking covers that scared Eighties and Nineties kids witless. Now, that same vibe has come to Shudder in the form of Josh Forbes’ Destroy All Neighbors, starring none other than Eighties hero Alex Winter.

Winter, star of 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and 1987’s The Lost Boys, has mostly been in his writer-director era for the past few decades — save for a recent appearance as Bill S. Preston, Esq., in 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music. He’s back in front of the camera in Destroy All Neighbors, though, as Vlad, an ogre-ish neighbor from hell whose antics are getting in the way of prog musician William Brown (Jonah Ray, Mystery Science 3000) finishing his magnum opus. Winter also produced the flick.

After Will accidentally kills Vlad — and teams up with his reanimated corpse to jam — the hapless musician forms an all-star band of Deadites to finish his record. It’s all pretty surreal and nonsensical, but straight-up throwback fun, featuring Thomas Lennon (The State) as Will’s boss at a recording studio, Man Man’s Ryan Kattner as a douchey musician in golden undies (he also did the score with bandmate Brett Morris), comedian Kiran Deol as Will’s long-suffering girlfriend, and Randee Heller (Mad Men) as their spaced-out building manager.

After the movie dropped on Shudder late last week, Winter spoke with Rolling Stone about becoming Vlad, A.I., and the future of Bill & Ted.

Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in this film. 
It was one of those movies that came together very quickly once it came together. Jonah Ray is a friend of mine, and some of the other people involved I’ve known tangentially. There are people who do this kind of comedy or extreme comedy, improv-based type stuff, and we all tend to be within the same commune, so these were folks that I was either aware of or whose work I knew. Jonah approached me with the film and just said, “Look, we’ve got this thing we’re looking to put together. Do you want to come on as a producer?” Then, “Hey, would you be interested in playing Vlad?”

I responded to the script because I thought it was a bold direction, doing so much of it in-camera. I think that that kind of gets mistakenly viewed as a throwback, but I love [director F.W.] Murnau and [Carl Th.] Dreyer and early cinema. I like using theatrical techniques in film. It gives you a very visceral, very specific kind of response, and I come from theater, so as an actor, that is kind of how I was trained, which is why I like doing prosthetics and masks. I really responded to those elements of the script, using grounded improv-based comedy with a very modern theme about trying to survive in the modern world, trying to make a living, trying to live your art. Then, of course, turning that into a ridiculous sendup. It doesn’t take itself seriously. I just don’t see that very often.

Tell me a little bit about the prosthetic process. You’re unrecognizable in this movie. How long did it take to become Vlad?
Much less time than it used to! I mean, it’s painstaking, but it only took about three hours. It used to take me four and a half, five hours. I think the old-man makeup in Bill & Ted 3 took about the same, with Kevin Yagher, which was pretty elaborate makeup. 

The beauty of it is that it takes almost no time to get out of it now. It used to take hours and hours to get out, and it was just brutal. You were exhausted and it’s just somebody with a brush, just inching the stuff off your face, like removing grout, and now it just all kind of pops off almost like a Mission: Impossible mask. That’s a fricking lifesaver. Everything is pretty sophisticated. You breathe through it, you don’t really feel it on your skin. You have a lot of facial mobility, so you can really emote and express. It’s not like having a big foam box glued to your head.

Let’s talk about the character of Vlad and who you were channeling or what you might’ve studied to get into his proverbial skin.
I have a whole process, like every actor. I have a physical movement coach, a vocal coach, a dialect coach, so I talked to my dialect coach about wanting to be from a specific part of Romania, actually where my family is from. I wanted Vlad to be from a war-torn country; he sort of escaped to America and is just hiding in this desolate building, sort of a walking dead type of character. I don’t mean the show. I mean literally. Everyone’s gone, family gone, so I sort of saw him as a refugee from the Romanian uprising in the Eighties and early Nineties. What I think will make Vlad funny is if he isn’t a cartoon character. I actually take the time to build a real person, even if the audience doesn’t know my backstory.

How did you get into his physicality? 
The beauty of doing prosthetics work is it is very theatrical. I was studying a lot of butoh [Japanese dance theater], believe it or not, and other forms of theater that involve sort of hyper-expressiveness. Again, it’s so rare to get to do anything like that in film. Film and TV are hyper-naturalistic today, which is great and I get it, and I love that kind of acting, too, but I got to do a lot of work around that — a lot of physical work, animal work, just trying to make this guy really live in his body in this way. 

With prosthetics, that’s important, because as much expression as you have with the makeup, if you don’t do anything, you just kind of die. You just become this rock. Jonah said he was really scared of me when I first showed up on set because I looked so pissed off, and I realized that’s just Vlad, if I don’t do anything. Resting Vlad face is very angry-looking.

You were recently in the new Bill & Ted, but it seems like you’ve been doing more directing than acting recently. What was it about this movie that made you want to get back into acting?
I really stepped away pretty solidly after Freaked and wanted to focus on writing and directing. Frankly, I’d been acting since I was nine, professionally, and I just needed a break, which is kind of common for child actors. I needed to sort of live a normal grown-up life for a little while and not be in the spotlight, and have kids and raise a family and take the bus, but I didn’t stop studying because I love to act. I was actually training all through that period that I wasn’t acting, with pretty great acting teachers all over the world, and then here in New York and in L.A., but I was working in London, so I was training over there as well.

I knew that I was going to come back at a certain point, and I just kept training. We started to build Bill & Ted 3 together, and it took so long to get made because nobody wanted to finance it. It took us about 12 years from when Keanu [Reeves] and [writer-director] Chris [Matheson] and [writer] Ed [Solomon] and I sat together and agreed to build this thing. I knew I was going to come back to acting to do Bill & Ted 3. I had the space for [more acting], and that’s kind of what led me to this: I can kind of pick and choose what I want to do.

It must be pretty powerful, then, to be in at least two cult classic movies that shaped people’s childhood.
It’s really sweet. I mean, it’s a funny thing people have often said, because I’ve done so many different things, “Does it bother you that you’re mostly known for playing Bill?” You’d have to be a complete curmudgeon for that to bother you because you walk down the street, little kids come up to you and they’re super happy to see you. It’s very sweet, and it’s obviously not all of who I am within my own life. My kids don’t think about Bill & Ted every day, right? They don’t even think about it at all. It’s just a little piece of your life, but it’s a very beautiful piece. 

Speaking of Bill & Ted and special effects, I was curious what you thought of the A.I. George Carlin special. I know his daughter was upset.
Yeah, Kelly’s a good friend of mine. Look, I was saying this all through the strike: This thing is not new. It’s an evolution in big tech that has been disruptive in a lot of ways for ages. I mean, really for decades now, and it’s gobbled up a lot of industries and it’s put a lot of people out of work, while it’s done great things and given more people access to movies and music than would have access otherwise, and allowed people to get into industries with their talent that wouldn’t have gotten in otherwise. There are a lot of benefits to technology, so I don’t want to say it’s all bad, and I don’t feel it’s all bad. 

These sorts of deep fakes that we’re going to see, they’re relatively unstoppable until we have antitrust laws that break up big tech and better publicity rights laws that address new technology, which we do not have. As I said to the unions, we’re not going to have those laws for a very long time. The government just does not move quickly, and there’s a lot of lobbying power from big tech that is going to be fighting against these laws, but there’s no other way to curb this other than legislation and antitrust. There just isn’t, so we have to build laws for the new world that we live in, and until we do, it’s going to be the wild west.

Bill & Ted is one of my family’s favorite movies. Any chance of a fourth?
Keanu and I love to work together. These people are like family. I’ve known them most of my life at this point, and we are close, and we all enjoy working with one another. So yes, we are talking about a fourth. Chris and Ed have a great idea and we are developing it, but given that the last one took us a dozen years to get off the ground, I could very well be in my seventies before we make it.