Lily-Rose Depp had to comply with some requirements for her role in Nosferatu. The Franco-American actress notably explained to Natalie Portman for Interview Magazine that she had worked hard to have an English accent.
Lily-Rose Depp wanted to work with The Witch director Robert Eggers so much that she auditioned for the role of Ellen Hutter in the Nosferatu remake, despite the required English accent.
The 25-year-old actress therefore spent a lot of time learning this accent for fear of making a fool of herself on the set of the gothic horror film.
“I always joked that the English accent was one I could never pick up. I always felt like I had a cockney accent,” she told Natalie Portman in an interview with Interview Magazine. “When I got this audition in my inbox and saw that it needed an English accent, I was like, ‘I’m about to make a fool of myself in front of Robert Eggers.’ But I wanted this role so much, so I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to try to improve my English accent.’
The young actress therefore got to work! “I worked with a wonderful dialect teacher, William Conacher, who was invaluable. I think accents are like a wig. If he’s not good, he’s just not good,” she said.
In this gothic horror film, The Idol star plays a haunted young woman who is stalked by the ancient vampire Count Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård.
Filming involved other demands. In addition to her English accent, Lily-Rose Depp also had to deal with wearing a corset, meticulous choreography and, difficult to bear, fake blood in her eyes. “There was blood that I had to put in my eyes, and it brings tears to my eyes just talking about it. My eyes are very sensitive, so the blood in the eyes was a big deal for me,” she recalled. “There is also a moment where – without giving anything away – there is a lot of blood on my naked body. And because the camera is very precise, I had to sit in this position for a very long time. I was like, “It’s all mental. I’m fine. I relax.”
Nosferatu, also starring Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Willem Dafoe, will be released in the United States and France on Christmas Day.
