Robert Eggers clarifies that, no, Harry Styles was never going to play Nosferatu's Count Orlok

Eggers also talked about the difficulties he's experienced with trying to get the movie made

By Reid McCarter  |  April 13, 2022 | 1:00pm
Film Features Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers clarifies that, no, Harry Styles was never going to play Nosferatu's Count Orlok
Styles waves goodbye to a role he was never meant to play. Photo: Hulton Archive

For a brief moment last month, we believed that Robert Eggers’ long-awaited Nosferatu was both finally moving forward, and that Harry Styles himself was cast in it. Visions of an emaciated, bug-eyed Styles, his luscious locks shorn and his fingers shaped into long claws, have been burned away by the harsh light of day, however. Not only is Styles no longer attached to the project, but, as Eggers has explained, he was never meant to play the vampire Count Orlok in the first place.

Speaking to IndieWire while promoting his latest movie, The Northman, Eggers was asked about what was up with his version of Nosferatu. He said that the news we heard about last month came from him “trying to get the word out because the word did carry that Harry Styles was going to be in the movie.”

“I just want to be clear,” he continued, “that he was going to be Hutter and not Nosferatu himself.”

Instead of a rodent-toothed vampire, Styles would have played Nosferatu’s Thomas Hutter, the analog to Dracula’s Jonathan Harker that F.W. Murnau created for the 1922 film in an attempt not to get sued by Bram Stoker’s estate. While this casting choice would’ve been less fun than a singing, dancing, heavily tattooed version of Orlok, it does make a lot more sense.

Eggers’ clarification was given alongside some unfortunate news about the movie’s fate in general, though. “It’s fallen apart twice,” Eggers said of the film before adding that he’s “been trying so hard. And I just wonder if Murnau’s ghost is telling me, like, you should stop.”

Eggers, whose love of black and white filmmaking and creepy Germans is well established, went on to discuss his desire to make the movie despite the fact that another remake, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre, already exists. The writer/director preempts his opinion by stating that he loves Herzog’s work and the 1979 movie’s cast and score, but that he still “[feels] like it is uneven.”

He cites the “front-lit night scenes” (“…just Herzog doing Herzog”) as one criticism but finishes his thought by saying that “because of German history and German cinema history, it was [Herzog’s] right to do that film, and he needed to do that film.” Eggers, on the other hand, thinks maybe “Murnau’s telling me I don’t have the right.”

Hopefully the expressionist ghost lets up on him a little and gives the guy a shot. After all, even if an Eggers Nosferatu doesn’t turn out to be as great as it could be, nobody’s going to be harder on it than the person who made it.

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