Bill Skarsgård was counting down the minutes until he could shed his Count Orlok look while filming “Nosferatu.”
Skarsgård, who stars as the titular monster, apparently was “alarmed” by the prosthetics to transform into the undead Count, according to writer/director Robert Eggers.
Eggers told Deadline that Skarsgård was more than skeptical about the aesthetics of the film.
“Bill sees the sculpt of the bust and he freaks out, and he’s like, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me, this guy didn’t look like me when he was even alive. What the fuck?’” Eggers said. “He wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the point, that you’re totally transforming into somebody else.’”
Eggers continued of Skarsgård, “And then, he’s putting the makeup on and he’s like, ‘Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.’ And then, once they put the hair on, even though the makeup wasn’t totally finished, I saw the first moment when he was like, ‘OK, this is cool. This is a person.’ I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something. That was the next step of enjoying who the character was and could be.”
And while Orlok was originally slated to be a character for an actor older than Skarsgård, it was clear that Skarsgård was the only one who could bring the creature to life.
“I think it was the second full makeup and costume test, Bill entered, took his mark, and it was like, ‘Orlok’s there. He’s there,’” Eggers said. “What’s very interesting is not just the physical transformation, not just all the vocal work that he did, but the darkness that he needed to actually inhabit. It sounds silly, but it was real. He told me the kind of things he was thinking about, and it was frightening. And I’m glad he was able to go there. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise.”
Skarsgård added that while he was “uncomfortable” in the prosthetics, they were key to losing himself in the character.
“To create that voice it was just a heavy labor of a performance. The prosthetics took forever. Everything was very uncomfortable. You were very hot and you were very itchy and sticky. And then for me to just being able to use that voice that we worked so hard on, there was a whole regimen every morning,” Skarsgård said. “Not only every morning, but between every take. Between every scene, there was a whole routine that I built up in order to access the voice.”
He continued, “I became very obsessed…I was so in that mind state that I felt this is pure evil. I felt that the movie was evil. I think that felt like we were doing some sort of evil, dark, magic sorcery at times. I certainly don’t feel that way about the movie now that it’s complete. I think it’s actually beautiful. It’s scary and it’s horrific, but there’s also a lot of beauty in it. And it’s sensual and sexual and it hits on so many different layers. But in terms of reaching out as far as humanly possible away from yourself, and gathering whatever it is that you can gather, and just transforming yourself, this is, I think, probably as far as I’ll go in my entire career.”
