Bill Skarsgård's initial reaction to his Nosferatu costume: "What the fuck?"

Bill Skarsgård is no stranger to a transformative prosthetic (his It five-head will go down in history), but the actor’s Nosferatu regalia altered his features even “more so than Pennywise,” as he recently told Entertainment Weekly. In a new interview with Deadline, both Skarsgård and Nosferatu director Robert Eggers elaborated on the actor’s first reaction to the vampiric visage that he would don for the film, one which apparently wasn’t super positive.

“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. What the fuck?’” Eggers said, explaining that the star “wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed.” Apparently, it took a little while for Skarsgård to get to a place where he believed the vampire was “very sexualized,” as he told Esquire in May. At first, when he put the makeup on, he said, “Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.” 

It was the hair that did it, according to Eggers. The moment Skarsgård got it in place, “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,” the director continued.

Focus Features has so far done a tremendous job of keeping Nosferatu’s design hidden, which means that audiences will have to wait until the film premieres on December 25 to experience the full impact of Skarsgård’s initial revulsion for themselves. Until then, the teases—and anticipation—just keep mounting. “I remember thinking, ‘This is genuinely scary as hell, to be just next to him in a room, so I can’t imagine how it’s going to read on screen,'” said Lily-Rose Depp, who plays object of Nosferatu’s obsession, Ellen Hutter. She also called the costume “genuinely petrifying-looking” and “a total nightmare,” so we clearly have a lot to look forward to.

Nicholas Hoult, who plays Ellen’s husband Thomas, experienced all of those emotions for the first time on-camera. “It’s kind of that thing where you’re like, ‘Oh, I know I feel uneasy,’ but Tom is too polite… It’s all kind of a weird fever dream,” he reflected. 

As for Skarsgård, the transformation felt so dark that the movie itself started to feel “evil,” he recalled. He doesn’t feel that way about the finished product, which he called “beautiful,”  but the lengths he went to create it. In his words, “In terms of reaching out as far as humanly possible away from yourself, and gathering whatever it is that you can gather, and just transforming yourself, this is, I think, probably as far as I’ll go in my entire career.”