Bill Skarsgård’s ‘Gross’ Nosferatu Is Supposed to … Turn Us On?

He’s gonna be gross in a sexy way. Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Bill Skarsgård wants us to have complicated sexual feelings about his version of Nosferatu’s Count Orlok. He’s the star of Robert Eggers’s upcoming remake of F.W. Murnau’s original German Expressionist vampire horror (which is an unauthorized Dracula adaptation). Murnau’s bloodsucker isn’t a brooding guy who sparkles in the daylight or a hot coven leader who runs a BDSM nightclub or a chaotic bisexual, he’s scraggly looking, what with the unfortunate gaps between his long thin fangs and the fact that he desperately needs to get his eyebrows threaded. It begs the question: Will Skarsgård’s Orlok be one of those conventionally sexy vampires, considering the source material? “He’s gross,” Skarsgård says in an interview with Esquire published May 29. “But it is very sexualized. It’s playing with a sexual fetish about the power of the monster and what that appeal has to you. Hopefully you’ll get a little bit attracted by it and disgusted by your attraction at the same time.” He doesn’t tell Esquire much else about the film, but we know the most important fact now: It’s a film for the freaks.