Robert Eggers wept at how “powerful” Lily-Rose Depp‘s performance in “Nosferatu” was.
The auteur told Deadline that even witnessing Depp’s audition for the role of Ellen, who is darkly linked to the eponymous bloodsucker, drove him to tears.
“Myself, the casting director, and even the videographer were in tears, because it was so powerful,” Eggers said. “She was, as she is in the film, incredibly brave, and raw, and powerful. Her ability to tune into this dark and haunted place so quickly is pretty phenomenal.”
Eggers previously told Vanity Fair that he had to limit the amount of takes during production due to how dedicated Depp was to the physicality of the role. Depp’s character Ellen suffers from seizures when she is possessed by Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).
“It was very physically demanding on her,” Eggers said of Depp’s performance. “I tend to do a lot of takes, but there are some times when you realize we only have so many takes because it’s just so exhausting for her to do that. That’s her. We didn’t spruce it up with CG. She is doing those movements.”
He added, “Ellen has always understood and sensed the other, and she’s highly tuned into the otherworldly. She’s a deep person, but she doesn’t have the language to talk about this stuff. As a young woman in this period, she also doesn’t have any authority. So she’s being called melancholic and crazy, and so forth. And so she’s a very misunderstood character. So as much as Orlok is a demon, there is also something that he offers. […] The archetypal motif is a demon lover story. It’s not so much love, it’s obsession. And I think that that’s the nature of this relationship.”
Depp even practiced the Japanese dance known as butoh to emphasize the “hysteria” of the role.
And Eggers wasn’t the only one transported by a performance on set: Depp also told Deadline that the camera test with co-star Skarsgård in character as Count Orlok was “scary as hell.”
“I remember thinking, ‘This is genuinely scary as hell, to be just next to him in a room, so I can’t imagine how it’s going to read onscreen,’” Depp said. “He was genuinely petrifying-looking, and then, once we started actually shooting the movie, it was otherworldly, because, like everything in a Robert Eggers movie, the detail — the way they made his skin look and feel, the costume, the whole thing — feels so real, and it feels like a total nightmare. That’s what I think is so unsettling about it: it’s not just like looking at a monster; it’s like there’s something very human about him, which I think makes it all the more terrifying.”
