'Nosferatu' star Bill Skarsgård embraced opera to get his vampire voice right
There is so much of vampire Count Orlok in “Nosferatu” that isn’t Bill Skarsgård: facial prosthetics, creepy undead makeup, eerily long fingers. The deep rumbling roar, though? All Skarsgård, all the time.
It needed to be him, the Swedish actor argues. So much so that when the idea of modulating Skarsgård’s voice down (for max creepiness) was brought up, he was “vehemently against” it and ready to go to battle if needed.
“I was like, ‘Please, please don't. You can amplify it and you can make it echo-y and you can project it more.’ But I wanted that piece of the performance to be me,” says Skarsgård, 34.
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He’s a favorite of the horror community for his fiendish take on Pennywise in the hit “It” movies. But playing Orlok in director Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” (in theaters now), an undead Romanian vampire obsessed with young German woman Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), marked a more all-encompassing experience than being an evil clown, Skarsgård says. “There was just a lot more factors going into it with voice work and voice warm-up and having everything prepared and being able to activate the character.”
Orlok cuts a formidable figure made even more disconcerting by his constant wheeze, rolling R’s and guttural dialogue. But to get just the right pitch, Skarsgård worked with Icelandic opera singer Ásgerður Júníusdóttir on lowering his own voice an octave for the full Orlok.
“A lot of it was just the technicality of rooting the voice as deep as you can in your body and using your entire body to make the voice resonate,” says Skarsgård, who took tips from the opera star like “place the voice out of your forehead.”
Skarsgård perfected Orlok's tone in his living room. “I was so relaxed and it was just like the most vibrant my voice has ever gotten,” he says. And then he used the tools he learned to get it right when the cameras rolled: Skarsgård built a 20-minute routine for himself where he’d warm up his voice – but not too warm, “because I needed that gravelliness to it” – and then would do vocal exercises between takes as well as “a lot of Mongolian throat singing just to have it active and deeply placed.”
As if that wasn’t involved enough, there was an extra degree of difficulty added in those moments where Orlok speaks Dacian, an extinct language, in scenes where the vampire communicates with Ellen via their psychic connection. And with all of it, Skarsgård was able to make Orlok's personality pop.
In one scene where Ellen’s estate agent husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) has come to Orlok’s Transylvanian castle to sign papers on the vampire’s new German property, Thomas nicks his finger with a knife while cutting bread. Skarsgård wanted to play around with the voice a little when Orlok sees the blood: He sent Eggers a voice memo he recorded titled “Tiger growl.” Which speaks for itself.
So when Orlok's signature wheeze turns into a low, hungry growl, “you feel him being excited. He’s so exhilarated,” Skarsgård said. “I wanted something that would add to the tension there. I was really happy with how that played.”