Oscar Isaac may have loved Robert Eggers‘ “Nosferatu,” but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a little jealous over the skills on display in the film. Moderating a Q&A in New York City this past week with cast members Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård, Isaac praised the craft of “Nosferatu,” offering particular appreciation for Depp’s incredibly physical performance and the work Skarsgård did to achieve the haunting voice of the undead Lord Orlok.
“That pisses me off,” said Isaac, upon finding out that no effects were added to achieve Orlok’s timbre. He continued of Skarsgård’s performance, “I think what really strikes me is when you say you’re ‘an appetite.’ At one point, Willem’s character says that it’s a force greater than evil cause evil, it’s quite binary, right? This is something even beyond that.”
Skarsgård echoed Isaac’s assessment of Orlok, expressing the difficulty of embracing such a figure, especially at the beginning of the process when he was trying to authentically find the character.
“It’s a very abstract role to undertake, cause you’re sitting in your hotel room or living room working on it, looking like yourself and trying to explore the voice and everything and you’re losing your mind,” Skarsgård said. “You have to be crazy to do what we do, I think, but the pieces with the prosthetics and the costume, all of that makes it feel real when you’re performing it.”
In working to capture the evil Orlok exudes, Skarsgård focused his efforts on becoming as inhuman as possible. As Orlok is often featured in the shadows and can only be defined by how he communicates, Skarsgård focused much of his time on creating a voice that felt otherworldly. To achieve that, Skarsgård established a method to put more bass in his voice, while at the same time adding more resonance.
“The voice was something that I knew that he wanted it inhumanly deep, and I don’t think my normal voice is very deep, so it was, ‘OK, how can I access a depth that I didn’t know I had in me?’” Skarsgård said. “That was a wonderful exploration and working with an opera singer trying to lower the voice as deep as possible and trying to be as relaxed as I could and I explored with it and I worked on it so much that I’ve built out this little routine for myself that I knew that, ‘OK, my voice is great when I’m really relaxed.’ So I used this 20-minute routine that I would do to be in the place where the voice was resonating and coming from me as opposed to feeling like I was putting on the voice.”
Watch the full “Nosferatu” Q&A moderated by Oscar Isaac below.
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