The final scene of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu was notably disturbing, with Count Orlok feeding on Ellen Hutter while locked in an intimate embrace of sorts. While the moment saw Orlok meet his demise — and with Ellen sacrificing herself in the process — the film’s take on “Death and the Maiden” was an unsettling and bloody image to close out the film and it turns out the gory ending was even more gross for the actors to film and it took a lot longer than you might think. Speaking with CinemaBlend, Bill Skarsgård, who plays Orlok in the film, explained that he was fully covered in latex for the scene, which took 30 takes and ended up being a very sweaty affair.
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“Everything is like, I’m covered in latex, full body. The only surface of me is my eyeballs and the soles of my feet. That was the only thing. Everything was covered,” he said. “And when we were doing the finale, the final moment of the movie, we did 30 takes of it. Without spoiling it, it’s a lot of physical performance. So, you’re completely exhausted, and you’re sweating through. What started happening, because there was nowhere for the sweat to escape, it just created this giant bubble on my stomach. It started growing like a tumor. And then between takes, they had to pierce it. And then on top of that, fake blood and sweat and saliva. It was a gory mess.”
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While it certainly sounds like filming the scene was messy, it was almost much, much more gory. Eggers previously revealed that originally the plan was to have Orlok bleeding out one additional orifice as he died, but it ended up being “comical” and required them to quite literally put a cork in it.
“Well, if you look very closely at that shot, Orlok is still bleeding out of his eyes, ears, and nose,” Eggers said. “There are some maggot holes in his back. We also rigged it so that he would be bleeding out of his anus, but it was very comical. When we started rolling, we had to literally put a cork in it.”
These additional details about the final scene in Nosferatu certainly make what was unsettling and haunting on screen even more so, but it also doesn’t take away from the impact. For Lily-Rose Depp, even with the gory nature of the scene, there’s something “heartbreaking” about it that viewers can take away.
“[The end scene is] heartbreaking and kind of bittersweet in a way because she’s doing a good deed and she’s breaking the curse, but she’s also indulging in a dark desire that she has,” Depp said previously. “We wanted all of those things to be palpable, to feel real.”
Nosferatu is in theaters now.