He Was Taunted About His Body. Then It Made Him a Star.

Javier Botet is built like a weeping willow tree. The limbs of his nearly 6-foot, 7-inch frame end in elongated fingers and feet. His joints bend in unlikely directions. 

Botet uses his physique—and feelings of otherness it has sometimes caused him—to transform into things that materialize out of shadows in movies. 

He shambled into “It” as a rotting leper. In a sequel to “The Conjuring” he towered over victims as a grinning specter called the Crooked Man. He was a corpse trying to reclaim its toe in “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” 

Now the Spanish actor who specializes in nightmare characters is playing the granddaddy of them all, Dracula. 

“In some ways, he’s the start of monsters in the movies,” said Botet. The 46-year-old actor notched a career goal by taking on the famous vampire in “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.” Produced by Amblin, it’s being released in theaters Aug. 11 by Universal, home to classic monsters in black and white. 

The new movie is based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. It features a brief account of the ship that carried a hidden Dracula to England as crew members disappeared one by one. The chapter includes an excerpt from the Demeter’s log with the captain’s bare-bones description of “a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale.”   

There’s been a century’s worth of vampires on movie screens since actor Max Schreck loomed with snaggle teeth and batlike ears in “Nosferatu,” the silent German expressionist film from 1922. Later manifestations played up the suavity in the title Count Dracula, with Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee immortalizing the monster’s seductive image.  

There’s nothing sexy about Botet’s version. 

“The Last Voyage of the Demeter” begins with Dracula in a vulnerable state. At sea, the vampire is deprived of the blood source he packed for the voyage: an undead villager who escapes from her dirt-filled crate stowed with his in the Demeter’s hold. Starving, the vampire lurches around in the dark for sustenance. 

Low-key creepiness was instrumental to the movie’s tone and Botet’s performance, said Norwegian director André Øvredal: “The hunger had to come through his body language, the way he hides and cowers. Javier was very into the fragility of the character and the fact that he’s not always powerful.”

Wearing a latex body suit of sickly gray, Botet channeled personal feelings into Dracula’s pitiful state. “In my childhood, for a lot of time, I felt like a monster. I had a very peculiar body. I felt different from the other boys, and sometimes they were cruel,” the actor said in a video interview in late June from his home in Madrid.

“All the things in my childhood that were so painful, they are beautiful now to use,” the actor said. “I use them like gold.” 

Botet has Marfan syndrome, which affects the connective tissue in his body. Roughly one in 5,000 people live with the genetic condition and its characteristics that typically include a tall, thin frame, curved spine, extreme nearsightedness, hyper-mobile joints and disproportionately long arms, legs and fingers. Many people with Marfan, including Botet, have had surgery to mitigate some of the condition’s most dangerous traits, especially weakness in the cardiovascular system. According to the Marfan Foundation, treatment often involves mental-health therapy for issues that can arise when your looks draw unwanted attention. 

Some kids taunted Botet with names like “Jack Skellington,” the lanky skeleton in the animated “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” But for Botet, his body was a source of fascination, not shame.

“When I was a child, I would get out of the shower and spend a lot of time in the mirror,” he said, recalling how he marveled at his wingspan and the way shoulders, elbows and fingers folded in unusual ways. Looking back on those private performances, the future actor said he was “priming for what finally happened.”

Before he started playing creatures, he spent years drawing them. He grew up in southern Spain, making art influenced by the non-human stars of genre films like “Star Wars.” 

“Now that I’m older, I understand that I found the beauty in weird things, in weird bodies, in fantastic creatures, maybe because I already had a self-consciousness that I was different.”  

Art school in Granada led to work as an illustrator and storyboard artist. He shot short films and enrolled in a movie makeup class, where he made contacts that led to his first film credit: “humanoid” in “Beneath Still Waters,” a 2005 flick shot in Spain.

The cult popularity of a found-footage style movie from 2007, “REC,” put Botet on the radar of horror fans as a disfigured, demonic woman in the attic of an infected apartment building in Barcelona. 

Another nominally female role triggered a bigger breakthrough for the actor: the title character of 2013’s “Mama,” about the violent ghost of a grieving mother trying to take possession of two sisters. When a screen test for “Mama” on YouTube revealed Botet crawling around in a gown, a lank black wig and a mask, some viewers were surprised to learn that Mama’s uncanny movements weren’t computer generated. 

“Mama” director Andy Muschietti went on to feature Botet in his adaptation of Stephen King’s “It” and a sequel. Botet’s growing body of work made him a peer of creature specialists such as Doug Jones, a frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator who haunted the filmmaker’s “Crimson Peak” with Botet.     

“Not many people know what we know—what it’s like, day by day, inside all these layers,” Botet said, recalling a moment when he and Jones, in full alien regalia, shared a long-suffering look on the set of the series “Star Trek: Discovery.”   

To stay tranquil through hours in the makeup chair and hours of discomfort on set, Botet again draws on childhood. “A lot of doctors, nurses, surgeries. I was always letting people work on me, and trying to be patient. Relax, forget, try to let the professionals work,” he recalled.

In “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” starring Corey Hawkins as a doctor who joins the crew, and “Game of Thrones” actor Liam Cunningham as the ship’s captain, some of Botet’s most effective acting moments were his most subtle, the director said. 

As crew members chop through a door to the captain’s quarters to rescue a boy trapped inside with Dracula, they catch one of their first glimpses of the vampire. 

“He’s just standing there, half in shadow, and a little look he gives to the camera becomes a big moment,” Øvredal said. “There are so many levels to what Javier can do.”

By the movie’s climax Dracula has transformed into a full-blown bat man with fangs and red eyes. He takes wing with the help of computerized visual effects that add to Botet’s prosthetic makeup and costuming. 

Botet says these physically taxing roles take a toll. “It’s day by day getting harder because I’m getting older but also because of the Marfan,” he said. He has been doing comedic roles in Spain and plans to do international comedies and more directing. But not because he has a problem with creatures.

Botet took note of a social-media testimonial by a young man with Marfan syndrome who said horror filmmakers painted people with the condition as monstrous. The post touched a nerve for Botet, who disagreed. 

“The people who want to hurt you will find a way to hurt you whether or not they have a movie monster to compare you to,” Botet said. Like any actor with a unique look, he added, his helps him change into something else. “Meantime, I’m doing it because I love it, and it gives me a life.” 

Write to John Jurgensen at [email protected]