The Munsters interview: Jeff Daniel Phillips on working with Rob Zombie

We chat with Jeff Daniel Phillips about playing Herman Munster in Rob Zombie’s The Munsters, their other collaborations, and being a character actor.

Picking up the role of Herman Munster is a daunting task. Fred Gwynne’s performance in the original 1960s sitcom is iconic and promises to loom over whatever you do. Stray too far from Gwynne and you’re not really playing Herman Munster. Stay too close and you’ll be performing in his shadow.

Taking on any role that’s already been established by another performer who has given a memorable performance is unenviable. For Jeff Daniel Phillips, who plays Herman Munster in cult horror favourite Rob Zombie’s colourful and cartoonish revival movie The Munsters, there was a further challenge that came before the performance; the extensive make-up application process.

“Four hours to get in and an hour to get out. So that’s five hours of your day.”

I can imagine, on the first day of shooting, the excitement carrying you through. But on the fourth day of the fourth week?

It sounds torturous.

“It can be, but you kind of have to zen out, you know?” Phillips tells me. “I’ve done a bunch of prosthetics stuff. There’s an iconic character in commercials here I did for a decade, so I know the gig. But we had this Hungarian FX team and they were all women and they were fantastic. When you have that kind of support, it’s great. I’d come to set, do my thing; I’m exhausted, I’m about to fall over. I’m in this muscle suit so I’m 15 degrees hotter than everybody else, dripping sweat. I’m drinking Gatorade and they just throw me back in the chair and they get the make-up off me, throw me in a van and I go back to the hotel.”

“When you have a great support system like we had in Budapest you’re in good hands. So it is intense and you just have to lose that and try to bring life to the character.”

Performing in prosthetics

I’m talking to Jeff Daniel Phillips as The Munsters releases in the UK. Phillips has played key roles in Rob Zombie’s last four movies, after playing two smaller roles for him in Halloween II (2009). Zombie has put together a troupe of characters actors and Phillips is very much at the heart of it. Even before that, he had a recurring gig as the aforementioned Geico Caveman in both ads and the sitcom that followed them. That experience informed his performance in The Munsters.

“I know that the more you keep up the movement, the less people are concentrated on where the seam is or getting the make-up. The more you come to life, people get lost in it and it becomes more the character. In my experience, anyway.”

“I pushed it as much as I could. Even in the camera test, I got so woozy I thought I was just going to pass out because I didn’t know how far I could go. But once the camera was on, if you watch the movie I’m constantly moving. Because Herman was just created – I’m not giving anything away, it’s in the trailer – but I wanted him to be a teenager, childlike. I wanted him to be kind of goofy and move around, as did Fred Gwynne. Fred Gwynne definitely had a childish manner with the way he did it.”  

“And my guy, he was just created and he was trying to find his voice, trying to find his body as things are coming to him he doesn’t quite understand. I try to keep it moving and hopefully it works. That’s what I shot for, anyway.”

It’s a performance that hinges on physicality. Finding a level of performance that works with the make-up, when you look different and physical gestures can mean different things is a challenge. A further part of the challenge? Doing so safely.

“Obviously, you have a great director that can reign you in and tell you how far you’re going. That’s the key. But as far as me, I just try to push it as much as I could and keep limber and do yoga in the morning. A few times I fell and I didn’t get hurt, which I was surprised. I thought I was going to blow out my knee or something falling off those shoes, but everything seemed to work.”

Just how many falls were there?

“At night time when you’re working all night and you’re switching your sleep schedule and you can’t see everything and you’re trying to be kooky and then you trip over a cable or whatever it is…” 

A dormant franchise

Following the original successful sitcom, which ran for 70 episodes between 1964-66 (The Munsters and The Addams Family TV shows both debuted within a week of each other), it’s often felt like no one has quite known what to do with The Munsters.

The show was followed immediately by the feature film Munster, Go Home (made to bolster the series’ syndication package) which, while tremendous fun, remains the family’s lone theatrical outing to date. A 1981 TV movie reunited the original cast (bar the character Marilyn, who had been subject to repeated recasting), while further attempts to bring The Munsters back found varying levels of success but made minimal long term impact.

Rob Zombie’s attempt to bring the characters back to the screen has had a similarly long and frustrating journey. Originally suggesting the project to Universal while shooting his debut House Of 1000 Corpses back in 2000 (which Universal would go on to shelve, and finally saw release from Lionsgate in 2003), the project would start and stop for some 20 years before finally going, only for the COVID pandemic to cause further complications and disruptions.

For Phillips, this meant a long period of gestation for his take on the character, which served to help him address the pressure, the expectations, the everything hanging over his performance.

“He [Zombie] wanted to make it for a couple of decades and it would come and go. 12 years ago I was driving and he gave me the call and as he explained it I started hyperventilating. I pulled my car over and I was like, ‘whoa, whoa, what?’ I was extremely honoured but obviously pretty anxious because, as we know, Fred Gwynne is so iconic. How are you going to match or try to honour that?”

“It kept on happening over the years. That didn’t happen 12 years ago and then a few years ago it was going to happen and it kept getting delayed. So by the time we were ready to do it, I got rid of a lot of the anxiousness and whatnot. I’ve already studied enough and we talked about it enough. It was exciting. We showed up there and we got to rehearse for a month and we shot for two months. We were in the middle of Budapest during a curfew during the pandemic. Everything’s shut down so we were in a small hotel and that’s all we could focus on because nobody could come and visit us. It was intense and yet I think it paid off.”  

Promotion

Rob Zombie’s The Munsters saw release in the US in September 2022, with a dual release on Netflix and physical media formats (it was a rare modern release to feature an extensive making of documentary and director commentary).

The film had originally been announced without release information, leading to speculation as to how much it cost and how it would be released. Zombie would take to the internet himself to dispel rumours of a $40m budget (saying that his last five films combined didn’t add up to that) and explained that it was set for a Netflix release before he signed on to make it. The film was produced by Universal’s home video department, as reported since the film’s announcement, suggesting a theatrical release or bloated budget were unlikely to have been considered.

Phillips is still in promotion mode, even months later as the film sees UK release. That means interviews like this one and social media posts. But on a film like The Munsters, a studio property with a cult favourite director behind it, knowing what you’re allowed to post and when would seem to be perilous.

“It’s a Rob Zombie film, man. You stay out of the way of any of that and he tells you when to release whatever. You honour him. This is his vision, this is his project and we’re all lucky to be on it. So we don’t want to mess with any of his promotion or anything. There’s a group of us that all know each other and we all know that. That’s part of the reason we’re there; obviously he trusts us. But, especially in this situation, he doesn’t want anybody to mess up the machine the way he has it envisioned. So, yeah, that’s part of it. Promotion is big.”

“I go to a lot of these conventions at the release of these movies and there’s a group of us; Dan Roebuck (who plays The Count) is another one, and Richard Brake (who plays Dr. Wolfgang) is a great guy. We try to get out there and promote as much as we can. Who knows when it comes to the Internet or anything else, how it’s going to be perceived. People get so kooky about these things before it’s even seen.”

Indeed, from the film’s announcement it has been subject to extraordinarily harsh speculation. In particular, a common complaint predicted a filthy, gory Munsters reimagining more in line with writer-director Zombie’s previous films. When Phillips saw people crying foul at a version of the movie that didn’t exist, I reason that he must have been tempted to correct them.

“It was interesting because a lot of people, and they always do, come for him in the beginning and they haven’t even seen anything yet. It’s a love letter to the show. We love the show. Rob loves the show. He’s been trying to do it forever. If you watch the movie, there’s all these tips of the hat to these iconic characters and cameos. So they have to trust that, you know, and the Internet tends to be kind of a negative place sometimes. We just do what we can.”

While standing next to Rob Zombie might earn you the ire of the internet, it comes with perks too. In the case of The Munsters, the film is subject to some fancy merchandise. There are collectibles from toy company Neca and a deluxe double vinyl release of the soundtrack from Waxwork Records (which released similar sets for most of Zombie’s other movies).

“Those Waxwork (soundtracks), it’s amazing that they’re putting these things out and they should be out because they’re so rich. Even this last Munsters movie, we recorded all these songs, some of them didn’t end up in the movie. He just has such a depth for his projects. What did make it in there, it’s great, but you know there’s even more. It’s cool. It’s exciting to be part of something like that.” 

In fact, Phillips is a performer on the soundtrack, as Herman Munster fronts a band called Herman and the Punk Rods.

“We recorded that at his house. He was in one room with Zeuss, this guy that does his music, and I was in the closet with the microphone doing some of it. I did some at my house on my phone, and I just sent it to him. He was coming up with stuff all the time. Once he gets going, it’s exciting.”

Collaborating

While it’s unsurprising how often he comes up in a discussion about The Munsters, Rob Zombie seems to feature in most of Phillips’ answers. Everything comes back to him. I decide to dig into their working relationship, which began with Halloween II (2009). Phillips played two roles in that movie; Howard, who works at the Rabbit in Red club, and Uncle Seymour Coffins, a horror host with a taste for mean spirited one-liners.

“That was my first time working with him so I have a fondness for that one.”  

“We just met and he dug what I did. I was leaving and he goes, ‘hey, what are you doing next week? I got another part for you in the movie.’ Hey, I’m there! You never know with him. If he likes something, he’s organic, he lets it go. That movie in particular, it just kept getting wackier and crazier. I think they cut his budget in the middle of it so he’s just like, ‘okay, this is what we’re going to do.’ He was on his toes and I think it shows up on screen. Everybody was into it when we were shooting, too.”

“Even the first night working with them, because when you get cast in a Rob Zombie movie it’s on video and a lot of times you meet him first time on set. So in that case, it was. Obviously there’s clothes, he checked out the costume. But he saw me work on set and I think I came up to him and I said ‘hey, do you mind if I riff a little off of this?’ And you can tell he just looked at me like, ‘this is going to be a nightmare with this guy; just stick to my script, do your lines, and then maybe we’ll do it.’”

“After the first take, I riffed after I hit the lines and then everybody started laughing and he’s going, ‘okay, I get it, I’ll let you go some more.’ A lot of that stuff ended up in the film, when I’m with Michael Myers behind the bar talking smack to him. I think that moment I was like, ‘wow, this is exciting working with this guy.’ If he sees something he likes he’s going to continue.”

“I always refer to him like a jazz composer. He has the composition but if he sees one of his players doing their thing, he adjusts it and makes sure they have their moment. That’s why it’s exciting to work with him. He’s not like ‘this is my storyboard, follow this.’”

“It’s all about performance with Rob and he loves character actors. He hires a bunch of character actors that are egoless and we’re all working towards the same thing. So his sets tend to be very passionate and exciting and you never know what’s going to happen. That film in particular, I really dug it.”

Watching Halloween II (2009) back, Phillips will have certainly had an experience; watching himself die. In fact, the gnarly death is one of the most violent in the entire movie.

“They’re like, this is when I was getting in the wardrobe, ‘he’s gonna lift you up and bodyslam you on this concrete.’ And I’m like, ‘he’s not gonna do that to me.’ That was the only time I think I’ve had a double on his films. Usually I get thrown in, for whatever reason I don’t think they had anybody for me on 31. I’m like, ‘are you kidding me? This guy’s a huge wrestler. He’s going to lift me up and throw me down.’ And thank God I did that because the poor stunt guy, he lifted him up and slammed him, and that guy just was like, you know….”

“Then I proceeded to watch my head get stomped. It was a trip. That was Wayne Toth that did the head and the special effects and he’s done a lot of the special effects. He’s just so talented. So he really pulled it off, I thought. Brutal.”

Independent filmmaking

Then there’s 31, Zombie’s crowdfunded movie from 2016 which found Phillips slacking, playing just one character.

“In 31, I thought I was going to die after the first week or two. Then he came to me in the morning and goes, ‘I think you’re going to live.’ And then like a couple days later, ‘I think you’re going to make it through this chainsaw thing.’ So in the movie, when you’re acting with someone like that, you’re on your toes and you’re out of your mind, just like in the movie you’re in. You’re never sure what’s going to happen. I think it comes across a lot of times in his films.”

The Uncle Coffins character in particular has stuck with Phillips. A canny YouTube searcher might find the videos he made as the character after Halloween II. In fact, he even joined Rob Zombie at music performances, taking to the stage in character to tell jokes to the crowd. And with his Herman Munster sharing a taste for bad jokes (“My Mother-in-Law fell down a wishing well…”), I ask if he’s texting Zombie about a spot on his next tour.

“No, that’s a whole ‘nother deal, man, to do all that make-up. Seymour Coffins is just like some flour and a burnt cork in the closet, I could put that on. No, Herman’s a big deal. I don’t think that’ll happen.”

As we start to wrap up, I ask about those Uncle Coffins skits and whether he planned on doing more.

“That was a lot of fun. I used to do more of that stuff. Recently I haven’t done anything like that. I was just telling the story that, these conventions, I go to these conventions and I meet the people and I try to promote the movies when they come out. Horror fans are so loyal and passionate. A lot of people have seen those shorts and they’re like ‘when are you going to do more?’”

“The last convention I went to, they put me on an independent filmmaking panel, and I started talking. It was a Sunday morning and there were 40 people there, I had to just come off the cuff with what they wanted to know about independent filmmaking. I found it so inspiring that these young filmmakers were so passionate and as I was talking to them I realised, ‘oh yeah, I do know quite a bit about trying to pull it off’. I’ve done a lot of fringe theatre and we do that kind of stuff all the time. But I got done and I got on the plane and I was like, oh man, I need to do this more often, making stuff.”

“So I’m shooting something this week. I shot something a little last week, there was a project that got postponed, so I’m going to try to pull something off this month.  I do enjoy that. I hadn’t done it in a while, but yeah, I think I will start doing it. And it’s not with Uncle Coffins, it’s something else. But yeah, it’ll be fun.”

It sounds, too, like it’s going to be something more long form.

“I have enough friends that people are like, I’ll help you, let’s make something. I’m shooting something this week and it has a horror element, but it’s more like a heist, noir, Los Angeles. It’s a weird one, but I like it so hopefully someone else will.” 

We finish on a final word about the The Munsters. Many of Rob Zombie’s films have developed cult followings over time, with almost all of them meeting strong criticism on release. It’s possible to read some of Phillips’ responses in this interview as defences of the film against complaints that are likely to fade away over time. But alongside that defence, certainly, is gratitude and pride in his work.

“It's nice to open up the audience. It’s a gateway to horror for kids and families are able to watch it. We’re excited that these people come up to us at these conventions. It’s a love letter to the show, we were trying to honour the show. We’re not trying to replace it. We’re big fans of it. So hopefully people get that and go back and watch the original episodes too, because we all do.”

The Munsters is available on digital platforms, Blu-ray and DVD now.

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