We had heard that Bill Skarsgård was unrecognizable as the vampiric Count Orlok in Nosferatu, and that clearly extends to his voice.
Director Robert Eggers has already stated that we will not get a proper look at this new take on the titular vampire until we're actually watching the horror remake, but it seems the filmmaker wasn't quite as strict about allowing fans to hear the character.
A new clip from the movie debuted during Nicholas Hoult's appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show, and it unveils co-star Skarsgård's raspy, baritone voice as the dreaded Count.
The IT actor reportedly trained his voice to drop a few octaves for the role in order to make it as deep as possible.
“I didn't want it to feel contrived," he said in a recent interview. "I wanted it to feel otherworldly and f**cked up and unsettling. Robert writes beautiful descriptions. As an actor, you feel very fortunate working with such a script, because it's almost like working off a novel."
He continued: “You have these descriptions that are so visceral: the pained, laboured breath of Orlok. Even with speaking, there's an element of pain in it – it almost hurts him to speak. All those little things were building blocks for the development of the voice.”
If you'd rather not hear the voice until you're watching the movie, this should be considered a spoiler.
Eggers revealed his thought process behind the vampire's look during a recent interview with Deadline.
“What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like? That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schreck’s makeup design.”
As for Skarsgård, while he would ultimately get used to the design, he was far from convinced upon first seeing the prosthetics he'd be required to wear.
“Bill sees the sculpt of the bust and he freaks out, and he’s like, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me, this guy didn’t look like me when he was even alive,'" recalls Eggers. "'What the f*ck?’ He wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the point, that you’re totally transforming into somebody else.’ And then, he’s putting the makeup on and he’s like, ‘Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.’ And then, once they put the hair on, even though the makeup wasn’t totally finished, I saw the first moment when he was like, ‘OK, this is cool. This is a person.’ I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something."
Audiences will get to see this new version of the Count for themselves when Nosferatu arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.