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Watch 'Renfield' star Nicholas Hoult eat crickets, reveal bug-eating secrets on 'The Tonight Show'
Nicholas Hoult and Jimmy Fallon tried Renfield's favorite snack.
Renfield, the upcoming horror-comedy from Universal Pictures, is the kind of movie that sets out to take some very familiar elements from a classic story and present them in new ways. One of those elements, lifted straight from Dracula the novel and various film adaptations, is Renfield's penchant for eating bugs, and on The Tonight Show this week, star Nicholas Hoult got to show off his insect-chomping skills in real life.
RELATED: Nicolas Cage hams it up as scorned Dracula in bloody final trailer for Renfield
Longtime Dracula fans will know that Renfield (Hoult), as Dracula's (Nicolas Cage) devoted familiar, is not allowed to consume human lives or human blood. Instead, he feeds his need to consume living things by eating insects, granting him some small measure of the power his master feels. In Renfield, that sense of power is pushed to a more literal extreme, as Renfield's bug-eating grants him a brief burst of superhuman strength, speed, and agility, upping the action movie factor of the film.
On The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon brought up the bug-eating as a key element of the film, and asked Hoult the obvious question: Did you really have to eat bugs for the movie? The answer: Yes and no.
"There was a fair amount of bug-eating," Hoult said, adding. "It depends. The props department were incredible, and they did build [bugs]. For cockroaches, we had like caramel ones that looked very authentic, so they were yummy. For the worms, it was like gummy worms in crushed up Oreos to look like earth, so again, very yummy. The one bad one was potato bugs. Potato bugs, they were real and they were disgusting, that was not a nice flavor."
Renfield also ate real crickets for the film, so Hoult decided to rope Fallon into the bug-eating fun by bringing on bowls of dried, flavored crickets for the pair to munch during their interview. Of course, Fallon wasn't as game as the practiced Renfield star was, but he still partook, which you can check out in the video above. Now we just need Hoult to launch his own brand of flavored crickets as a movie tie-in, and the whole world can know the joy of eating bugs like Renfield...superpowers not included.
Renfield hits theaters Apr. 14. New episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon air weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on NBC. All episodes of the current season are now streaming on Peacock.
