Nicholas Hoult says Robert Eggers gave him Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu penile prosthesis

Nothing could have prepared Nicholas Hoult for this Nosferatu Gift box he received from director Robert Eggers.

The actor revealed this in a recent interview Elle Video in which the director sent him the prosthetic penis that Bill Skarsgård wore in his portrayal of the vampire Count Orlok, as a reminder of his time in the long-awaited horror film.

“I had Count Orlok’s prosthetic penis made at home,” Hoult told his co-star Lily-Rose Depp. “There’s a scene where Bill Skarsgård sips my blood and asks Robert Eggers, ‘How was that for you?’ … And I said, ‘I could feel his prosthetic penis on my leg.'”

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Of course, when Hoult finished filming, Eggers gave him the prop so the actor could always see it and remember the experience. “Rob had it framed and sent to my house,” he remembers. “But the frame was broken when it got there, so I had to take it to a local frame shop and say, ‘Hey, dude, you can do this.’ Did you fix that?’”

Although the author initially seemed to agree with the request, Hoult noticed that the man did I have a few questions when he came back to pick up the prop.

“He kind of didn’t even blink the first time, and then when I came back to pick it up, I think he realized how strange it was – what I was imagining, maybe like this vampire penis?” Hoult said. “And he said, ‘Is this some kind of collector’s item?'”

Hoult added: “I thought, ‘Yeah, you could say that.'”

The 35-year-old plays Thomas Hutter – a hapless real estate agent assigned to help Count Orlok (Skarsgård) buy an estate in his town – in Eggers’ reimagining of the legendary silent film, which was famously an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s film Dracula. In a scene in Eggers’ film, Orlok becomes agitated after witnessing Hutter accidentally injure himself and begin to bleed.

The prop was one of many prosthetic pieces that, taken together, contributed to Skarsgård’s almost unrecognizable transformation into a vampire. In conversation with Weekly entertainment Last month, Skarsgård revealed that he had prepared for the role by learning from an opera teacher to lower his voice a full octave and sending voice notes to Eggers until they found Orlok’s perfect, menacing tone.

“The character is a bit paradoxical because he is very powerful and demanding, but there is also something fragile about him because he is a corpse,” Skarsgård explained. “So the voice has to be very strong, but at the same time there has to be a kind of fragility or almost pain and effort when breathing and speaking.”

Nosferatu hits theaters on December 24th. Watch Hoult talk about the prosthetic in the clip above.