Nosferatu star Bill Skarsgård has revealed he found the role so overwhelming he’s sworn off horror roles, saying he never wants “to play something this evil again.”
The 34-year-old actor appears as the enigmatic Count Orlok in the Gothic vampire horror from director Robert Eggers.
He is also known for playing the terrifying clown Pennywise in the It movies.
However, he says his latest role was even scarier. Speaking to Empire, Skarsgård said: “When we were done with it, I was like, ‘I never want to play something this evil again. I never want to put on prosthetics again.’”
He added that the end of shooting “was a relief,” and continued: “It really affected me. Orlok is an occult sorcerer, and it did a number on me in terms of just trying to inhabit that space.”
The Swedish actor, who is the son of fellow actor Stellan Skarsgård, said working with an opera singer to lower his voice by a whole octave as part of his vocal performance in Nosferatu was particularly taxing.
“The voice was the thing I worked the hardest at,” he said. “For a month-and-a-half leading up to the shoot, I didn’t do much else than just record myself. And on set, I would keep doing these exercises.
“It sounds kind of like Mongolian throat-singing. It’s [insane].”
Skarsgård’s efforts have been rewarded with glowing critical praise. In a five-star review of Nosferatu for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey writes of Count Orlok: “He is, of course, a vampire. And a vampire is the ultimate vessel of sex and death.
“Skarsgård’s transformation into the demonically unrecognisable is too genuine a surprise to spoil here. But the wheezing rumble of his voice, and its rolled ‘R’s, allows him to repulse as much as he seduces. His voice seems to emanate not from his mouth, but from the walls themselves. He sucks blood not from the neck, but down on the breast, accompanied by rhythmic thrusting. It’s erotic, but not in the satisfying sense. He is an addiction that brings no pleasure.
“He’s trailed always by an army of plague-ridden rats, which seem to drive seemingly level-headed folks like Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin) Harding into apocalyptic despair. Disease is an ever-present fear, and Eggers’s Nosferatu has been a decade in the making – yet, now, in the shadow of a pandemic, its sensations feel sharper than ever.”
