Vincent Price blamed House of Wax for a common misconception. Here's how The Fly changed it.
He was always up for spooky stuff. Being the bad guy? Not so much.
It's difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when the public wasn't overly familiar with Vincent Price. When The Fly was released in 1958, Price wasn't yet established as a "horror actor." Sure, he'd had success in the genre before then, but it hadn't cemented him as the icon we know him as today.
However, that all changed with The Fly, as the film proved to be one of the most critically and commercially successful horror movies of the 1950s. It would change Price's life forever, and he'd be eternally attached to the horror genre. At the time, however, he was instead identified as a cinematic villain, an observation he responded to in the pressbook interview for The Fly:
"But it's not true. I've done more comedy parts than villains... More straight parts. For example, I've done only three horror films prior to The Fly— and in this my role is straight— but House of Wax was a tremendously successful picture and I played such an outlandish character that people remember me in it. I've given better performances in a number of better films, but no one remembers that..."
Indeed, before becoming a horror legend, Price was mostly viewed as the heavy, a perception only aided by the bona fide classic House of Wax, in which he played Professor Henry Jarrod, the film's surprise twist villain.
The Fly would continue to push Price's horror bent and cast him not as the baddie, but as the picture's main protagonist character. So, while it did wonders to link Price with horror further, The Fly did loads to expand the public's consciousness in terms of what kinds of roles the actor could shine in. This, of course, was more than fine with him.
"I don't want to be identified with any special type of characterization, certainly not with villainy... Shakespeare was right, I must admit, when he wrote: 'The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.' But I wish he weren't so precise."
