After seven years playing erudite teen Jughead on the CW’s hit Riverdale, Cole Sprouse is ready to tackle new challenges, genres and performance opportunities. So why not start with playing a reanimated corpse?

“I've been incredibly privileged with Riverdale, to get the financial stability and freedom to pursue other projects,” Sprouse says on a recent dark and stormy afternoon in Los Angeles. “My mission statement now is, if the kid that was put into acting when he was super young got to make the exact movies he wanted to make, what would those movies look like? And Lisa Frankenstein is kind of the first [answer] to that line of questioning.”

The inclement weather suits the vibe of Sprouse’s new film Lisa Frankenstein, a genre-bender written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, which revolves around misunderstood teen goth Lisa (Kathryn Newton) and her doting reanimated zombie boyfriend, Creature (Sprouse). Williams says she wanted the character to be “part Mr. Darcy and part Buster Keaton, with just a sprinkling of Edgar from Men in Black” and knew Sprouse could make the most of the non-verbal role.

“Since he doesn’t have lines, he had to be a good listener with a lot of longing and a sort of sad boy sweetness, while also having killer comic timing and a love of old school monster physicality. No small ask!” says Williams. “Thankfully I’ve been friends with Cole for years now, and I knew immediately he was exactly the monster we needed. I sent him off to mime school, and by the time he was on set, he already had endless ideas for Creature’s voice and physicality.”

Sprouse connected with movement and mime coach Lorin Salm, who helped him develop the character’s physical evolution over the course of the film, from rigor mortis-restricted beginnings to a slightly more mobile denouement.

“I wanted Creature to feel like this genteel silent movie star, so we broke down the character into the different stages of physicality, according to how much more of his body was a function,” Sprouse explains. “It was a lot of fun. I had never really had any formal movement training as an actor before, which was nice.”

The actor is also responsible for creating his character’s unique communication style: a combo of grunts and croaks.

“It was just something I improvised on a take on the first day, and then Zelda liked it,” says Sprouse. “He's completely silent in the script, but I was concerned with leaving Kathryn with too little [in our scenes]. She carries so much of this movie, I wanted to help alleviate that as much as I could, and I think that kind of did the job.” 

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When he’s not in front of the camera these days, he’s very literally behind it, from a recent chic and furry photo shoot with his former Riverdale co-star Charles Melton — “that was a very funny shoot,” says Sprouse — to his decidedly more snarky Instagram account, Camera Duels. He calls the cynical tone of that one “just a performance,” in which he captures photos of people trying to sneakily capture a shot of him — “may the fastest camera win,” as the Instagram bio says. “I think it's funny for social media, but it actually doesn't bother me as much as perhaps the account may suggest,” Sprouse admits.\

Sprouse says he’d love to get to a place where he can focus more on photography.

“I rarely, if ever, say no to someone asking for a photo, and a conversation is always wonderful,” he says. “I think we design a lot of our interaction with celebrity culture now off of the kind of social currency we can get from it on social media. Celebrity culture has changed a lot since I was a kid, and our interactions with it have changed quite a bit. I think Camera Duels is fun because it puts the power back in my court for that kind of weird interaction, but it's all lighthearted.”

Sprouse has both acting and photography gigs ahead of him, but after spending nearly his entire life on camera, the 31-year-old particularly looking forward to more work behind it. “In an ideal world, I'd love to have a commercial project and a more independent project and then just focus on photography throughout the year,” he says. “They're both gig professions, so when an opportunity arises, you sort of have to jump on it and see if it works. As of now, I juggle both.”