The new version of Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, is currently available in all cinemas, starring Bill Skarsgård in the role of Count Orlok. The actor, known for his role as Pennywise in Thatis unrecognizable as the iconic vampire, a frightening transformation that required hours of makeup and prosthetics.
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In an interview with Variety, David White, the makeup effects designer for Nosferatu, revealed that it took six hours of makeup and 62 prosthetics to transform Bill Skarsgård into Count Orlok. “Bill’s time in the makeup room chair varied from four and a half hours for his head and hands, six hours if he had prosthetics all over his body. Removing the prosthesis took about 45 minutes… For Orlok’s full body prosthesis, there are a whopping 62 parts that require a team of six people to apply them“, he explained.
A transformation process so intense that the end of filming was “a relief” for Bill Skarsgård
“When we finished, I said to myself: ‘I never want to play something that evil again. I never want to wear prosthetics again‘. It really affected me. Orlok is an occult sorcerer, and that affected me in the sense that I tried to inhabit this space” he told Empire.
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Besides the makeup and prosthetics for Count Orlok’s look, Skarsgård also worked with an opera singer to make the vampire’s voice even more menacing: “The voice is the thing I worked on the most. For a month and a half before filming, I didn’t do much other than record myself. And on set, I kept doing these exercises. It sounds a bit like Mongolian throat singing. It’s insane“.
In his version of Nosferatu, Robert Eggers wanted to find the most frightening aspect of vampires in cinema, as opposed to Edward in Twilight. “I think we deserve a creepy, smelly corpse again“, he told Total Film. In the end, the director was shocked by the transformation of Bill Skarsgård into Count Orlok.
What is the story of Nosferatu?
Nosferatu is set in 1800s Germany and follows the wealthy and mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) as he searches for a new home. Real estate salesman Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is assigned to lead the deal and travels to the mountains of Transylvania to take care of the paperwork related to the nobleman’s new property. But if there’s one thing Thomas didn’t expect, it’s meeting evil incarnate.
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Everyone around him advises him to abandon his trip, while in the distance, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is continually troubled by frightening dreams which relate to the man that Thomas will meet, who lives alone in a castle in ruin in the Carpathian mountains. Will Ellen’s strange relationship with the creature cause her to succumb to something dark and terrifying?
Article written in collaboration with our colleagues from I love cinema.
