Bill Skarsgård on Remaking Nosferatu and the Pressure of “F–king With a Masterpiece”
VANITY FAIR – He’s not the kind of actor who makes you feel for the monster. The Swedish star, best known as Pennywise in the It remakes, tends to shed his humanity as he probes our nightmares. In Nosferatu, he brings new life to the vampire: “The darker characters tend to be more complex. More mental gymnastics are needed.”
“I’ve always been a very happy monster.” So said Boris Karloff in 1962, looking back at three decades of creatures, ghouls, and killers that defined so much of his life onscreen. Bill Skarsgård hasn’t been at it nearly as long, but his tendency to play supernatural and terrifying figures suggests that, like his fiendish predecessor, he’s made peace with monstrosity.
The blockbusters It and It: Chapter 2 made him a horror icon as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, carrying on a long tradition in his Swedish acting family—which includes his father, Stellan, and older brothers Alexander and Gustaf—of playing haunting roles in hair-raising films. Since Pennywise, Bill has specialized in sinister, scene-stealing parts, from a high-society sociopath in John Wick: Chapter 4 to his recent turn as the otherworldly avenger of this year’s reboot of The Crow. His latest turn finds him playing the vampiric title character in Nosferatu, from The Witch and The Lighthouse filmmaker Robert Eggers, in a collaboration that brings an ominous new approach to the bat-faced antagonist of the 1922 silent film.
For Vanity Fair’s 2025 Hollywood Issue, he talked about touching the void and more.
