David Bridges
Most moviegoers’ 1st impression of Bill Skarsgård came courtesy of his functionality as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in 2017’s It and its 2019 sequel. He’s a superior-hunting dude, yeah, but he also has the capacity to twist his charisma into a thing dark and terrifying. That is been a recurring motif in the characters he’s played so far, and it sounds like Nosferatu could raise the bar even a lot more.
In a new interview with Esquire in which he talks about two upcoming films in which he plays an undead character—The Crow, out June 7, is the other one—Skarsgård says becoming Nosferatu’s title vampire presented some distinctive challenges. The film, directed by Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman), reimagines the 1922 silent classic of the very same name, itself a riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Skarsgård has been buddies with Eggers considering that 2015 and was truly regarded as for many unique roles in Nosferatu as the extended-in-the-functions project shuffled toward production.
But then Eggers decided Skarsgård could make a fantastic Count Orlock, in spite of initial worries he could be as well young for the portion. According to the magazine, “Skarsgård study for the function many instances. By self-tape. More than Zoom. In the studio with his hair slicked back and fake nails glued on. He tested out voices and sent them more than piecemeal in voice notes. He did 1 makeup test, and then a different.” At final, Eggers told Esquire, “I was like, ‘He’s come to be the character.’ It was eerie to see in the footage. Something he did, anyplace he turned or looked, you have been like, ‘He’s got it.’”
Then, when the film was lastly getting created, Skarsgård had to undergo additional transformations, receiving opera-singer guidance on lowering his voice and enduring hours of prosthetics and make-up just about every day (he claims he is unrecognizable as the character, and also calls his Orlock “gross… [but] pretty sexualized”). It kept him apart from the rest of the ensemble, which contains Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Simon McBurney, and Ralph Ineson, but he tells Esquire he cultivated that isolation. “It took its toll … It was like conjuring pure evil. It took a when for me to shake off the demon that had been conjured inside of me.”
Even Eggers was impressed with his star’s dedication: “I keep in mind early on, him attempting to speak to me about what it meant to be a dead sorcerer—and I’m into some fairly heavy occult shit, but he was on a unique level,” the director mentioned.
Nosferatu hits theaters December 25. You can study the complete Skarsgård profile more than at Esquire.
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