Draining ‘Nosteratu’ drove Lily-Rose Depp to don sweats and ‘watch something dumb’

For most horror fiends, Max Schreck's iconic vampire is the most memorable aspect of the 1922 silent-movie classic “Nosferatu.” However it's Lily-Rose Depp’s tortured young woman, the object of supernaturally obsessive desire, who's even more significant than the title creature in the new high-profile remake.

Just as the world is very different from 100 years ago, so is the Ellen Hutter in writer/director Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” (in theaters Christmas Day). While still the object of dark affection as she is in F.W. Murnau’s original German Expressionist film, Ellen has a larger emotional stake in the narrative and takes a much more active part in her own life, plus endures some seriously scary stuff.

“This role was truly like a gift in every single way,” says Depp, 25. “This myth has always fascinated me. And for Ellen to take center stage felt so special. It offers a depth to the story that we haven't seen before.”

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In 1838 Germany, Ellen is a newlywed haunted by nightmares of a dark, monstrous figure she formed a dangerous psychic bond with years earlier. She warns her estate agent husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) not to travel to Transylvania to meet with a client, but he’d rather she stop with these episodes of hers.

Ellen suffers seizures and physical fits as the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who yearns to be with her per their “contract,” navigates his way toward Ellen, though her ailments are dismissed by the men around her and even her best friend (Emma Corrin). Soon enough, they discover Ellen is right and learn firsthand of the death and disease Orlok brings in his wake.

Eggers wanted to retell “Nosferatu” through Ellen’s eyes to add “more emotional and psychological complexity,” he says. “It is the demon lover story. Like in ‘Wuthering Heights,’ does Heathcliff love Cathy or does he want to possess and destroy her? When you have a gothic romance that is so dark, a story like this helps us see ourselves but not always the things we want to look at in the mirror.”

But Depp also views “Nosferatu” as the story of “a woman trying to come to terms with things that she feels shame for or feels isolated by,” Depp adds. “On a human level, that is very relatable and kind of timeless. And though life is different now for women than it was in 1838, there are still so many aspects to this kind of oppression and stifling of women and what they're going through and believing women that's still very much alive and well today.”

The instances of demonic possession are “an external manifestation of the internal kind of turmoil that she's going through,” says Depp, who worked with a movement coach to harness the right emotions and physicality. Eggers from the start was confident she could pull them off: “In Lily’s screen test, she had the same kind of raw ferocity she has in the film. So I knew her performance was going to go to 125%.”

The director acknowledges he “lost a lot of sleep” over one important confrontation between Ellen and Thomas, a five-minute sequence where Ellen confesses her link to Orlok before mocking her husband (“You could never please me as he could”). Depp pushes over a cabinet with dishes, rips open her dress and makes a most unholy noise as her eyeballs go up in their sockets, tongue juts out and globs of drool pour from her mouth.

“It has to be something that could be real,” Eggers says. “When it gets too artificial and bodies are doing things that bodies could never do, it's not as scary as something where you think like, could that be me? Could that be my loved one?”

Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp, has appeared in the HBO show "The Idol" and films like the period drama "The King" and sci-fi thriller "Voyagers," but "Nosferatu" marks her biggest Hollywood role to date. And she had only been filming a couple days and was “getting in the flow of it all” when she had to do "this big crescendo” of a scene, Depp says. “That was a tough one, but I like it. I'm proud of what we did. It’s really cool.”

Her keys to decompressing after all of that? “Take the corset off and get some cozies on,” Depp says, laughing. “It’s always nice to get something in the bag that's harder. So, yeah, literally just get into some sweats and go home and watch something dumb. That's what I do.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Nosferatu’ star Lily-Rose Depp breaks down most unnerving scene