How ‘Nosferatu’ keeps Bill Skarsgård’s ‘chilling’ transformation in the shadows (exclusive)

Nicholas Hoult remembers his first encounter with the dreaded vampire Count Orlok. It started with the voice — a haunting, rumbling tone that cuts through shadow. 

Robert Eggers, his director on Nosferatu, a reimagining of the 1922 black-and-white silent film classic, played Hoult an audio recording of his costar Bill Skarsgård, the It actor behind Pennywise who now transforms into the titular lich king. In the weeks leading up to filming in Prague, Skarsgård studied with an opera coach to lower his voice an entire octave to reach the deep bowels of Orlok’s timbre. He often recorded himself experimenting with the voice, sending different Voice Memo samples to the filmmaker until they found the right sound. 

Skarsgård labeled one such audio file, “Tiger Growl,” which is just him breathing as Orlok. He thought about that famous scene when Thomas Hutter, the unfortunate estate agent, played in this film iteration by Hoult, accidentally cuts himself in the presence of his vampiric client, who then becomes almost aroused by the sight of blood. 

“It was unlike anything I’d heard before,” Hoult recalls to Entertainment Weekly of listening to some of those samples. “It was chilling to me. Rob was playing it off of his phone, but it still filled the room.”

“He really wanted a very deep, resonant voice,” Skarsgård says of the director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman. “The character is somewhat paradoxical because he’s very powerful and demanding, but there’s something frail about him, as well, because he’s a corpse. So the voice needs to be very powerful, but at the same time, there needs to be some sort of fragility or almost pain and labor in his breathing and talking.”

The actual look of Orlok feels far more precious. Skarsgård partially secluded himself from the rest of the cast ahead of filming; he would see folks on the weekend, but on shoot days, he maintained his distance from the likes of Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Ralph Ineson to enhance the impact of seeing him transformed. The same approach applies to the film’s marketing. 

Trailers and photos — including EW’s exclusive sneak peek at Nosferatu — keep Skarsgård’s Orlok relegated to the periphery, showing him through silhouette or shrouded in darkness. Only when audiences arrive in theaters on premiere day this Christmas will the general public see the results of the full hair, make-up, and prosthetics. (This approach was more recently applied to Nicolas Cage‘s serial killer look in the movie Longlegs, which Eggers says “only confirmed that this was the right decision.”)

The actors themselves are careful when talking about the reveal. “I’d hate to spoil anything,” says Dafoe, who plays the Van Helsing-esque figure Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. “The only thing that I thought was really great and felt really fresh is he looks like he could have been from Romania as opposed to a suave English guy or something. He had a look that was rooted in historic accuracy and a folk tradition.”

“I think the best way to discover Orlok is through the movie for the first time,” Skarsgård adds. “The movie functions on that, as well. He lives in the shadows for a long time, and it teases the reveal of the character as the movie progresses.”

In a similar vein, Nosferatu lurked in Eggers’ mind for most of his life. It’s a long-term relationship he now speaks about often, especially on this particular press cycle for the movie…. Around the age of 9, growing up in rural New Hampshire, he perused his local library’s collection of vampire books when he came across an image of Max Schreck, who originated the role of Count Orlok in the F.W. Murnau-directed film. “I thought, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,'” Eggers recounts. His mom then helped him order a VHS copy from a degraded 16-millimeter print through the mail. “It just had this very haunting atmosphere,” he says of the movie. “It almost felt real. Now, when you watch the restorations, you can see all the make-up, and the fake glued-on hair, and the bald cap. In the version I saw as a kid, that wasn’t there. It had a kind of beauty and maybe, dare I say, authenticity to it.”

As a teen, Eggers would adapt Nosferatu into a high school theater production, which was then discovered and reproduced on a larger stage by the Edwin Booth Theatre in Dover. When he eventually became a filmmaker, Eggers always intended to make the movie he’d been dreaming about, but — as tends to happen in Hollywood — there were many starts and stops. In the past decade alone, Anya Taylor-Joy was once locked to play Ellen Hutter, the role now inhabited by Depp, while Hoult had been briefly in talks for Friedrich Harding, now played by Taylor-Johnson, and Skarsgård was even going to play Hoult’s role of Thomas for a spell. What remained true to his vision through it all was his story’s focus on the character of Ellen. 

“I think it’s intimidating,” Depp remarks of taking on the part, “but with the knowledge that this has been his dream to make for forever comes the fuel to be like, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to be worthy of that story.'”

In Eggers’ film, Ellen’s telepathic connection with Orlok dates back to her childhood, which is a variation from the source material. Depp recalls her focused conversations with the director in which they honed in on the loneliness she must’ve felt as a young girl to call out for someone — or something — to feel companionship. “There’s a ghostliness to her,” says the actress, who recently headlined HBO’s The Idol but maintains a long-time love for horror and vampire stories. According to Eggers, Ellen is “as much of a victim of 19th-century society as she is a victim of the vampire.” Depp points to the character of Anna Harding (Corrin), a family friend of the Hutters who’s married to Taylor-Johnson’s Freidrich. “[Anna] is a very earthly, good Christian woman who is raising her children and doing everything that Ellen feels that she should be doing. So, to me, she’s not only being plagued by this demon…she’s also calling out to him. There’s like a forbidden love there, in a way.”

Despite the presence of a vampire and the horror elements, the original Nosferatu has undercurrents of a dark, gothic romance. “Some people have said it’s a love story, but I think it’s darker and more twisted than that,” Eggers says. “It’s very much a tale of obsession.” To Depp, if you took out all the scares, it’d be a macabre love triangle between Orlok, Ellen, and Thomas — “although it involves so much more than that,” she clarifies. “I always saw [Ellen] as someone who has one foot in the spirit world, if you will, and one on earth. She’s desperately trying to cling to life. In that sense, Orlock is the representation of death, and her husband is the representation of life. She’s definitely torn between the two.”

Hoult reveled in tackling the other corner of this triangle, which marks his second time playing a Dracula-adjacent character. First, he played a much more comical take on Renfield, the vampire’s minion of Bram Stoker’s original novel that inspired the figure of Herr Knock in Nosferatu (Simon McBurney’s role), in the Nicolas Cage horror comedy of the same name. And now, he slips into Hutter’s shoes. “It’s fun to explore the folklore and the text of it in different ways and in different styles, I suppose, and to see different interpretations of it,” Hoult remarks. “I’m probably done, though, now. Two is probably enough, but never say never.”

Dafoe is in a similar boat. Eggers’ frequent collaborator (this now marks their third movie together) starred as Max Schrek in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalized story about the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu in which the crew starts to suspect their lead actor might perhaps be a vampire himself. You might call him a living Easter egg of Eggers’ incarnation. “I’m not sure exactly what it means, but sounds good!” Dafoe responds to that notion. 

“I know the original Nosferatu very well,” he continues, “but also, I’ve dealt broadly with the vampire myth in other movies. It’s a rich thing to work with. In this one, where I function in the movie is very different, but broadly, what really impressed me about the kind of sensual, obsessive love of this is that’s not always stressed. This had a real sacrifice and obsession to it, and I liked very much my relationship to the understanding of what Lily-Rose Depp’s character must do, the kind of sacrifice she must make, her willingness and her understanding of it, and her passion for this force that she can’t quite identify.”

Of course, there will still be horrors plaguing audiences with Nosferatu. This is Eggers, after all. In his pursuit to make a true gothic tale, he felt compelled to embrace jump scares in ways perhaps his previous horror stories have not. “Doing Nosferatu, which sort of invented horror movies, I had a responsibility to do some jump scares, which is something that I’ve been at times critical of, but it felt like you got to do it here,” he explains. “If my son drops a LEGO set, smashes it all over the floor, it makes a loud noise. I’m going to jump, but is that frightening? Is that what horror is about? No, but if the story is saying that the protagonist is leading up to something with tension that it shocks them [in ways] they weren’t expecting, and it’s earned because it’s part of the story, then I think that’s great.”

Skarsgård experienced his own jump scare prior to filming. David White, the prosthetic makeup FX designer who worked with Eggers on The Northman and Skarsgård on The Crow, sculpted a clay bust of what the actor would look like as Count Orlok as a reference for the real thing. “I was terrified just looking at the image,” the actor remembers. “It looked so, so different from me, way more so than Pennywise. I was worried that I couldn’t perform through it, that it would feel like giant prosthetic pieces, and I couldn’t come alive through that.”

The words “Grinch” and “goblin” came to mind for Skarsgård, but it was on the second camera test, with him sitting in a chair in full getup and surrounded by candles, where it felt like the Count finally arrived. “That was the first time where I felt the camera was alive, and I [could] start becoming this thing,” he says. “Robert came up to me after, and he was like, ‘There he is.’”