Nosferatus Bill Skarsgård ‘Never Wants To Play Something This Evil Again’

Bill Skarsgård has built up a good reputation as a master of the macabre. He got his clown on as the petrified Pennywise i The film; bathed in black on blood for this year’s remake of The crow; played a ruthless assassin in video game-like The boy is killing the world; was the incisive scoundrel of John Wick: Chapter 4; and even appeared in twisted horror thrillers Barbarian (although to be fair he just ended up being a pretty nice guy in it). But his latest role tops them all, embodying one of cinema’s darkest shadow-dwellers of all time – Count Orlok, in Robert Eggers’ reinterpretation of Nosferatu.

But could the gothic vampire flick see Skarsgård hang up his horror boots for good? “When we finished it, I thought, ‘I never want to play anything that bad again. I never want to wear prosthetics again,'” he says Empirein our world-exclusive new Captain America: Brave New World question. Shooting was over, “was a relief,” he says. “It really affected me. Orlok is an occult wizard and it did a lot for me in terms of just trying to inhabit that space.”

Skarsgård commits himself fully to the Count, disappearing inside layers of prosthetics and even working with an opera singer to lower his voice an entire octave to make the iconic vampire as menacing and otherworldly as possible. “The voice was what I worked on the hardest,” he says. “In the month and a half leading up to the filming, I did not do much other than record myself. And on set I would keep doing these exercises. It sounds a bit like Mongolian throat singing. It’s (crazy).” Maybe if he’s done with horror, throat singing could be Skarsgård’s next venture? We’ll keep you updated.

Read our entire interview with Bill Skarsgård at Nosferatu in Empire‘s world-exclusive Captain America: Brave New World edition, on sale Thursday, December 19. Pre-order a copy online here.