Yahoo Movies Nosferatu’s Lily-Rose Depp gives a ‘masterful’ performance
Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, and director Robert Eggers speak to Yahoo UK about the vampire film, and the physical challenge that Lily-Rose Depp lived up to.
Watch: Nosferatu cast heap praise on Lily-Rose Depp
Lily-Rose Depp holds nothing back in Nosferatu, delivering an astounding performance that pushes her both physically and mentally in a way that her co-stars describe as "masterful" to Yahoo UK.
The actor plays Ellen Hutter, the woman who is the subject of Count Orlok's (Bill Skarsgård) obsessive desire and whom he will stop at nothing to possess. That feels like an apt word when it comes to Ellen, because in several powerful scenes she is possessed by the vampire like an exorcism, whose control of her mind forces her to revel in depravity and reveal her inner most secrets.
Skarsgård was particularly impressed with Depp's unfiltered take on the character, sharing: "She's absolutely incredible in the movie and it takes so much courage to commit to a performance the way she did. It's something that you cannot teach, what she has, what she possesses.
"It's raw talent, when we were doing the scenes together you're not witnessing a performance you're a part of a performance with an actor and it was great, it was her and I. We had talked with Robert as well what is the dynamic between Orlok and Ellen — it's not love, it's obsession, but it's almost like love and there is a lot of nuances there [about] why they're so drawn to each other.
"The scenes where I was every shadow is me doing it, so I would just be sitting on a stool and just going [covering her face with the shadow of my hand] and then I just got to see her act with no one really. It's just her looking out of a window and a hand comes up over her face, and every single take the tears fall and every single take she's just [in it].
"And then between takes, she's like, 'OK, was that OK?' I'm like, 'Oh my [god!]' Every single take is masterful, it's just something you can't teach. It's incredible."
Nicholas Hoult, who plays Ellen's husband Thomas, felt similarly, sharing that Depp had an "honesty" and "bravery" to her performance that he found "absolutely incredible" because of how emotionally available she was to everything her character experienced onscreen.
"It's such a special performance and one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed being on set," Hoult adds. "And then seeing the film as well, it's incredible."
Nosferatu director Robert Eggers worked closely with Depp on the performance, getting her to work with movement coach Marie-Gabrielle Rotie to perfect it.
"She's an expert in this discipline of Japanese dance called Butoh, where you can go outside of yourself to bring in something dark," the director explains. "We looked at studies of women who were diagnosed as having hysterics in the 19th century, and I worked with Lily on creating this dynamic performance [with] all these different body movements.
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"Yeah it is a very physically demanding performance that Lily-Rose gives, it's so challenging and so raw, and brutal, and frightening. She worked incredibly hard and it's not altered by CGI, that is her performance. Like this incredible backbend [she does in her possession scene], people have wondered if there's wire work involved but that's just her, she worked hard."
A feminine focus
Nosferatu may be a remake of the 1922 silent film of the same name but Eggers makes it his own by approaching the narrative slightly differently, with Ellen and her experiences at the heart of the story. In the original film it is only at the end when the heroine takes centre stage, but the 2024 version allows her to have her own agency and importance from the get-go.
This was something that Depp appreciated about the movie, telling Yahoo: "In a larger sense, it really deepens the story not just from a perspective of modernising it [but] seeing this female perspective and giving this female character the voice and the agency that she perhaps hadn't had in the original films —which I think, of course is amazing.
"But it actually just adds so much depth to the story and serves everyone because you get to see a perspective that is so complex and so tormented. So when you feel this yearning coming, not only from the part of this horrific monster but also from this young girl that is expected to be anything but drawn to this kind of darkness, it just adds so much, so many layers to the story that we're so fun to explore."
Eggers took inspiration from FW Murnau's film and how it portrayed Ellen as a somnambulist, a sleepwalker, because "in the 19th century was thought to be someone who can connect with another realm", he explains.
"I realised this is the way to build out this character, and if the story can be told through her eyes it would be much more psychologically and emotionally complex," Eggers says.
"That was kind of the whole thing for me: she does have agency but doesn't put on her husband's trousers and ride a horse into the sunset but I hope it's more compelling to see how much she's not in control even though she has agency, and how much people are trying to literally tie her down, and what she has to fight against to be herself in 19 century society that doesn't accept and understand her."
Nosferatu premieres in UK cinemas on New Year's Day.
