Nosferatu star Emma Corrin has said they felt like walked into "a bit of a time machine" while filming Robert Eggers' new gothic horror, while their co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson said the sets were "so rich with detail".
American director Eggers, known for his uniquely immersive and atmospheric films The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, has been in production on Nosferatu for a decade.
It is his reimagining of the iconic cinematic vampire first brought to the screen by F. W. Murnau in the 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.
The film stars Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a young woman in 1838 Germany who is haunted and hunted by Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a terrifying ancient vampire who summons her naïve husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to his faraway castle under the pretence of doing business with him.
Corrin and Taylor-Johnson play Ellen and Thomas's friends, Anna and Friedrich Harding.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Corrin said of the experience of shooting the beautifully crafted and chilling film: "It really felt like you were walking into a bit of a time machine, and all the costumes, I mean, the corsets were insane. The weight of it is something that is so hard to put into words. It was literally tonnes of fabric and your whole posture changed because you're basically weighed down.
"All of that affects the way you move in a space, the way you can react to stuff, but also doing still performances because you don't have a huge range of motion. It changes everything, it's like a real domino effect."
Taylor-Johnson continued: "On set, our home was just so rich with detail. There was a desk and one of the desk drawers had handwritten letters from my character to Emma's character and photos of our family - things that weren't even going to be seen in a scene.
"It's so rich, he [Eggers] has an eye for detail and he really demands all of that authenticity too so that you can really sort of soak it up."
Eggers is notorious for his perfectionism and attention to detail. He has an exacting way of working which involves carefully orchestrated sequences and many takes to nail down a scene.
Corrin, best known for their Golden Globe-winning performance as Princess Diana in the historical drama The Crown and for playing Cassandra Nova in the blockbuster Deadpool & Wolverine, said they learned a lot while working on Nosferatu.
"I learned that less is more and not to move my eyebrows, which I will say I think is very specific to the filmmaker!", they laughed.
"I think the way that Rob works, everything is so rich and so detailed around you and then he has these really contained, present, very still performances. I think in his particular alchemy of the way that his films work, it's so powerful. That was a really interesting lesson.
"As an actor, you have all these crutches and things that you fall back on and Rob makes you glaringly aware of all the little tips that you do. I really enjoyed it. It was fun to be confronted by some of those things. He's very specific and he has a really clear vision. I think that's a really beautiful way of working and I think as an actor I really respond well to that kind of thing."
Taylor-Johnson, who won a Golden Globe award for his role in Nocturnal Animals, agreed wholeheartedly with Corrin.
"I feel like you definitely grow when you have experiences like this one, he's like no other director I've worked with", the 34-year-old British actor said.
"It's very specific in the way that he likes to work. There is sort of a general format that most people [directors] go to, but his is so distinctively him, that it felt like a theatre company. These long, one-take shots, go on for 10 minutes and we're all in the room.
"It's an ensemble and we might mess up a line about four minutes in and then we have to go back again... So we had to really rely on one another and have a lot of trust. It became a really beautiful thing."
Nosferatu is out in cinemas on 1 January 2025.
