Though Willem Dafoe has starred in dozens of movies, acting in Nosferatu offered him the chance to try something he’s never done before — film with thousands of rats.
“That was very special,” he told Yahoo Entertainment about sharing the screen with 2,000 trained rodents. “My only anxiety was, I love animals! I was worried about stepping on them. But thankfully that didn’t happen. They were excellent co-stars.”
Dafoe plays an eccentric occult expert in the film, which opens in theaters Dec. 25 and follows a woman being terrorized by a vampire. It’s a full-circle moment for the actor, who played the original Nosferatu actor Max Schreck in the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire. It’s also his third movie with writer-director Robert Eggers, following The Lighthouse and The Northman.
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“He’s a great writer. He’s a great director. He knows my triggers,” Dafoe said. “I enter the world that he creates, and it tells me what to do. I feel engaged. I feel inspired. He’s a good guy.”
“I want to be in all of his movies,” he added with a laugh.
Willem Dafoe in Nosferatu. (Focus Features/Courtesy of the Everett Collection)
Dafoe said Eggers has a knack for making films “of another time” that still “feel so real and relevant.”
“As an actor, to have that opportunity to find another way of being, another way of thinking [and] get another perspective on our lives is beautiful,” he continued. “He’s the whole package.”
Emma Corrin, who uses they/them pronouns, plays a close friend of the film’s protagonist. They told Yahoo Entertainment that they were honored to receive a letter from Eggers asking them to be in Nosferatu.
“I was just like, ‘Yes, I don’t need to see anything. I’ll do anything you want!’” Corrin said. “Then I read the script and it was just beautiful. He writes these incredible, lengthy, prose-like descriptions of scenes, and you can instantly see what he wants. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
Eggers’s enthusiasm for his work has earned him a reputation as a “visionary,” as Corrin described him. But Nosferatu was an especially meaningful project for the director. He told Yahoo Entertainment that, in many ways, this is his most personal film yet.
“I’ve always loved vampires since I can remember,” he said. “My first Halloween costume that I chose for myself was the Count from Sesame Street. I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was 9 years old and fell in love with it.”
Eggers staged a play adaptation of it in high school, which was then picked up by a local professional theater that was impressed by his work.
“Nosferatu has always been a part of who I am,” he said. “I came into this [project] kind of unjaded and with the feeling of making a first feature, because it has the energy of stuff [I’ve] been living with for a long time.”
“But of course, it’s not enough just to be a dork about this. There has to be a reason to do it,” he added.
The original Nosferatu is a 1922 silent German expressionist film directed by F.W. Murnau. It was based on the vampire story from the 1897 book Dracula by Bram Stoker but features different characters. Eggers’s Nosferatu takes the female victim from the original film, Ellen Hutter, and makes her the main character.
Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu. (Focus Features/Courtesy of the Everett Collection)
“I was excited to tell the story through the eyes of a female protagonist, which hasn’t been done before,” Eggers said. “Murnau makes Ellen the heroine by the last act, but I thought if we started with Lily-Rose Depp’s character from the very beginning and experience it through her eyes … the film can be more psychologically and emotionally complex.”
To prepare to write the script, Eggers first wrote a novella about Nosferatu. He wanted to figure out his characters’ backstories, though many are never seen onscreen.
“One thing people ask me [is if it’s] hard to do a story that’s been done so many times,” he said. “It’s true! But there are some benefits, where you can see what always works, what sometimes works, what never works and what’s always missing.”
Nosferatu himself, also known as Count Orlok, is played by Bill Skarsgård. The film’s marketing hasn’t yet spoiled what he looks like in the role, focusing instead on the character’s sinister-looking coffin. There’s a novelty popcorn bucket shaped like a coffin for sale, as well as an enormous $20,000 replica of the sarcophagus.
Eggers said he was surprised that that was the main imagery emerging from the film, but he’s not mad about it.
“Myself and Craig Lathrop, the production designer, we spent a lot of time considering the coffin,” he said. “Willem always talks to the fact that I don’t point at things in my films. You know they’re there. We experience them as the characters experience them and no more.”
He acknowledged that the ancient vampiric bed is definitely awesome, though, and he’s excited for people to see all the “cool details.”
“There’s like, f***ing skulls all over it and stuff. It’s a really cool coffin,” Eggers said.
Nosferatu is in theaters Dec. 25.
