Bill Skarsgård wasn’t always Count Orlok: “I wrote him a very shamefully earnest letter”
Most audiences who ventured to a darkened cinema to watch Robert Eggers’ uber-gothic rendition of the 1922 vampire film Nosferatu were probably unaware of the film’s long, winding road to the screen. In fact, they may be surprised to hear the exacting filmmaker first attempted to make the film a decade ago, not long after the release of his first film, The Witch.
At that point, he even cast a few actors in the movie, including Bill Skarsgård, who eventually wound up playing a uniquely grotesque Count Orlok. However, back then, Skarsgård wasn’t set to play Orlok. Instead, he was cast as one of the other main characters—and he wound up having to write Eggers a pleading letter to even consider him for inclusion in the film at all.
Eggers’ relationship with the bald, spindly-fingered German expressionist horror classic goes back to the tender age of nine when he watched the original silent film on VHS. The young fan of all things macabre was so taken with the film that he put together a stage production of it while still in high school, which he has admitted is pretty embarrassing to look back upon. He told Screen Daily: “I played Orlok, but we can let that go. It was very expressionist…It was a silent film on stage, and we were pantomiming everything.”
However, despite Eggers feeling bashful about it now, the play impressed the artistic director of a local theatre company enough that they invited the plucky young student to stage a more professional version. Eggers admitted, “It changed my life, cemented the fact I wanted to be a director, and marked me forever with Nosferatu.”
After Eggers came to the attention of Hollywood with The Witch, he decided to return to the film that altered the course of his life and pitched a Nosferatu remake as his second film. Over the next ten years, though, the project would come together and fall apart several times before he finally brought it to the screen. One incarnation of the film introduced him to the young Swedish actor Skarsgård, whose father, Stellan and brother, Alexander, are also well-known names in Hollywood.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Skarsgård revealed, “I read the script, and the script just blew my mind”. At that time, Skarsgård had yet to shoot to stardom with his terrifying performance as Pennywise the Clown in It, so he wasn’t initially considered for a main role. He auditioned for the part of Friedrich Harding, which Aaron Taylor-Johnson would eventually play, but Eggers saw something else in him.
“He thought I could be good for Thomas Hutter,” explained Skarsgård, referring to the male lead of the film played by Nicholas Hoult. Skarsgård then read for that part and was officially cast in the role. To host Josh Horowitz’s astonishment, the actor confirmed, “So, I was supposed to be Thomas Hutter in this movie ten years ago.”
To Skarsgård’s disappointment, though, the movie wound up not happening, and Eggers made The Lighthouse instead in 2019. After that, though, it looked like the stars aligned again for Skarsgård and Eggers, as he cast him in his third film, The Northman. Once again, though, fate intervened when the pandemic started only two days into pre-production. This meant Skarsgård couldn’t fly to Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a screen test – and to add insult to injury, his brother Alexander wound up playing the lead in the film.
By the time Nosferatu started coming together again, Skarsgård was gutted to find out he wasn’t in the picture for Hutter anymore. Desperate to work with Eggers, he reasoned, “Well, maybe Frederick Hardinger. I thought, ‘That’s a pretty sick role, too.'” He felt out of the loop during this period, though, and decided to do something he’d never typically consider. “I wrote him a very shamefully earnest letter.”
What Skarsgård didn’t know, though, was that while he was penning a letter pleading with Eggers to let him play a supporting part in Nosferatu, Eggers had seen something that shifted his entire line of thinking. The director told Screen Daily, “In It Chapter Two, there’s a scene where Skarsgård plays Pennywise as a middle-aged man, and he had so much weight, and so much darkness, and I thought, ‘Maybe Bill’s Orlok?'”
Suddenly, after a decade of frustration, Skarsgard wasn’t just going to be in an Eggers film – he was being lined up to play the title character. The two men got together and worked out how they envisioned Orlok looking and sounding before they shot a screen test to see how it all came together. To Eggers’ delight, “Once you saw the screen test, it was undeniable.”
