Noseferatu cast were so scared of Bill Skarsgård he 'got inside their soul'

Watch: Nosferatu cast on Bill Skarsgård's terrifying transformation

Nosferatu's Bill Skarsgård knows a thing or two about horror and terrifying audiences, but he also has can have the same impact on set when he's playing monsters like Count Orlok, the cast tell Yahoo UK.

Robert Eggers' remake of the 1922 silent film of the same name is a tale of obsession as the vampire Orlok targets young bride Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp). In his quest to make her his own, the creature of the night will terrorise everyone in his path, including Ellen's husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult)

Hoult admits to Yahoo UK that when he first saw what Skarsgård had planned for his portrayal of the vampire, particularly the voice he would put on, he was in shock: "It wasn't completely kept a secret, but I remember the first time I got a sense of what Bill was going to be doing was when Rob had a recording of [him] on his phone.

"We were in rehearsals and he played it to live, and it was like, 'whoa, this is unexpected', but so powerful and even though it's just playing off a phone speaker it completely filled the room and like got inside your soul, and was terrifying even then.

"So starting to see the makeup designs and how beautifully planned and thought through that had been, and how steeped in history this idea of this version of the character was, made it feel so authentic.

"And then Bill is such a talented actor that every choice he then made with the physical voice and his commitment in every moment just made it a real presence to be around, which is kind of the thing that makes the movie. So it's lucky I get to be in those scenes with him."

Depp felt similarly, saying of her co-star: "Bill was both totally terrifying and also so cool and impressive, and just a testament to how much work went into building that character, of course on Bill's end but also the teams that worked on creating him physically. It was just mind blowing seeing the work that had been done because I mean there's no CGI."

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"He's gone," Depp adds of Skarsgård disappearing into the role. "What you see on screen is like exactly what we were seeing in person, the detail was insane, he really felt real.

"That's what makes the character so scary is that he doesn't feel like some kind of made-up monster, he feels like a real creature that's been unearthed, and he felt that way just seeing him too, which was insane, it was very cool."

Creating Count Orlok

Skarsgård explains that it was "a long process" to get the performance right for Count Orlok, with consideration being made to the way he would walk, speak, and even breathe in character.

"When Robert first approached me with the possibility to play Orlok he was like 'I think you can do this but you have to prove yourself too'," Skarsgård says. "He was more confident in my ability to do it than myself, I think, at that point but I was so excited about the potential of playing this character.

"Obviously he's been marinating this story ever since he was a little boy so he was sharing with me his research, gave me a few things to watch and look for inspiration for the character, and his scripts are beautifully descriptive. So there are these little clues, if you will, about Orlok — his breath is mentioned, and the voice is powerful but it's also laboured, and I think somewhere in script it says there's almost pain when he speaks.

"So those things when you hear them out loud, you go, 'oh, this is interesting. What is that like?' and then I started exploring it.

"We wanted it to be as deep as I could go with it," the It actor goes on. "And it was just a long process of finding it. I think the breath became a way into the voice, so how he breathes and how it is laboured and changes the way he speaks becomes very unique for him.

"So they all started... the breath, the voice and the way he spoke and the accent started to feed off of each other until you have the results."

Nosferatu is Eggers' passion project so it was integral to find a way to have Skarsgård be different to Max Schreck's iconic take on the character, and for him that meant going back to the origins of the vampire as a gothic horror figure.

"I went back to the folklore when people actually believed in vampires," the director says. "And in these early recorded cases of vampirism in Transylvania and Romania they are walking corpses, they're not handsome, suave, pale men in dinner jackets. They are quite horrible looking, and so then that led me to ask the question: what would a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?

"This led to the costume design and the his hairstyle and all those choices, there are little nods to Schreck with the finger nails, the shape of the skull, the hunch — but it is something else and the voice and the breathing was something that I imagined, so I wrote it into the screenplay.

"Bill worked with an opera singer to lower his voice an octave for the role, but it was something that we developed together. He would work on recordings and send them to me, and I would say a little more of this, a little less of that and we worked together very closely, but it didn't finally come together until he was in the full makeup and costume because it is such a massive transformation."

The director went on: "I always do a lot of rehearsal beforehand because I have these complex camera movements that are very rigorous and without a lot of flexibility, so it's important for the actors to learn the blocking.

"But Bill, while he understood the importance of it felt very much like a fraud because he's in there looking like a young, handsome guy in sweatpants, not able to like be what what he needed the full costume [and] makeup to become."

Nosferatu premieres in UK cinemas on 1 January 2025.