Bill Skarsgård unpacks his dramatic “Nosferatu” transformation: 'Either this will come alive or it won't'

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Nosferatu.

Count Orlok has arrived.

After months of keeping Bill Skarsgård's practical-effects transformation into the vampire of Robert Eggers' Nosferatu under wraps, audiences got their first-ever full-on look at the dreaded vampire when the film hit theaters on Christmas Day.

Orlok maintains a presence in the movie from the very beginning, but audiences only get a good look at him deeper into the story. Nicholas Hoult's Thomas Hutter, the unfortunate real estate agent trapped in Orlok's castle, finds his client sleeping in his sarcophagus, at which point the cat's out of the bag, and the monster comes fully into the light.

Skarsgård speaks of his heavy prosthetics-laden transformation — which includes a mustache and deepening his voice by an entire octave — in an interview with Entertainment Weekly (conducted weeks prior to the film's premiere).

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"I never felt like the character until I had everything on. So, full makeup and full costume," he says. "I remember our second camera test that we did. There's no audio, there's no voice recording. It's just the camera, a lot of candles, and me sitting in a chair. Especially when it's on film, you can actually hear the camera rolling, but you see that little red light, and then it's go time. We had done a bunch of rehearsals before that, but that was the first time where I felt the cameras were alive, and I [could] start becoming this thing."

Once Eggers acknowledged during that screen test, "Yeah, there he is," Skarsgård felt relief. "Me sitting, looking the way I look, and doing the voice and physicality, it is so abstract, and it feels fake, and it feels contrived," he says. "So, you're terrified because it's something that you can't really control. Either this will come alive, or it won't. I can't force it. It needs to be there." And it was.

The actor recalls how Eggers, who spent decades wanting to make his version of Nosferatu, created a digital drawing of Orlok that he shared with him while screen testing for the film. "Which ended up being two years before we actually went into production," Skarsgård notes. "That's pretty close to what he actually looks like in the movie."

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The look includes a skeletal face with protruding cheekbones, almost like the flesh is clinging to the bone; patches of decaying skin all over the body; and a mustache. David White, the prosthetics makeup effects designer, sculpted a bust to realize Eggers' vision.

The director speaks of Orlok less as a vampire and more as an undead sorcerer — a lich, if you will. "I knew what I wanted Orlok to look like. It happened to be that Bill doesn't really look like that," he tells EW separately. "When David did the sculpt, he put in a lot of care to not overly bulk up Bill's face but still give it the look that I wanted. Bill was like, 'Man, I didn't look like this guy when he was alive,' which was sort of my intention."

"I was worried that I couldn't perform through it, that it would feel like giant prosthetic pieces, and I couldn't come alive through that," Skarsgård says. "There was definitely a stage when they hadn't put everything on, where I was like, I look like the f---ing Grinch or a f---ing goblin. I did not like at all how it was translating." Once all the pieces were in place and the team finalized the coloring, it started coming together. "I tend to just go in and record myself just on my phone," he adds. "I do some scenes just to the camera and play around with what kind of light works and how you change your expression depending on what angle you are in."

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Beyond the prosthetics, Skarsgård worked with an opera coach to lower his vocal register to reach the gravely depths of Orlok's voice, full of rolled Rs and slow, meticulous speech that reflects the Count's Transylvanian accent. This came from his early conversations with Eggers about the role, in which they went back and forth, workshopping ideas and sharing different video clips and movie references. The actor was then secluded from the cast much of the time during production as he focused on this work.

"I know that Bill felt at times too lonely when he was shooting It. So, I said, 'You can be Bill on the weekend and hang out with people if you need that, but you're contemporary, and you're supposed to be playing someone who died when they were 50 and is now an immortal creature who cannot be anything but perfect. So, you need to have distance on set.' When he was discussing the inner world of this dead sorcerer to me in detail, it was pretty frightening. And I'm up for anything, really, but I was affected by how deep he dove. So, when he snaps into character, it's heavy, and everyone can feel it. And the makeup design is quite evocative. So, yeah, I think he was an intimidating presence — and needed to be."

Skarsgård gives a lot of credit to his experience playing Pennywise the Clown at the age of 26 for Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter One (2017), which really put the actor, now 34, on the map as the guy who can channel monsters. "I, too, think about my career in every aspect of it if I hadn't done Pennywise," he says. "I've approached characters very differently ever since I did the first It movie. In terms of the prosthetics, that is, in a lot of ways, a very superficial part of the job. It is something that's on top of the surface. In terms of creating something that is incredibly abstract and so far away from what I am as a person, Pennywise was the biggest [at the time]. I think Orlok is an even bigger leap."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly