Bill Skarsgård was busy taking a break. But then Gus Van Sant called. The Swedish actor, 35, had a chillingly good run playing villains, monsters and creeps since his 2017 breakout role as the terrifying clown Pennywise in It. His performance as the vampire Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ acclaimed 2024 gothic horror Nosferatu was instantly iconic, thanks to the low guttural voice the actor developed for the part. But donning all those prosthetics and playing the embodiment of evil must get tiring after a while.
“I had taken quite some time off, and I needed it for a bunch of different personal reasons,” says Skarsgård. He’d wrapped filming Nosferatu in early 2023 and his next film, Locked, later that year. He didn’t take on any jobs during 2024. “I hadn't worked for a while. I had no plan for when I would work again, really,” he says. But, he’d been watching “a lot” of films – many from the Seventies, coincidentally – and began thinking about how he’d want to get back into acting, but only if the right project came along – ideally a “scrappy, indie, character-driven thing”.
