However Willem Dafoe starred in dozens of films, starring in Nosferatu offered him the chance to try something he had never done before: filming with thousands of rats.

“It was very special,” he told Yahoo Entertainment about screen sharing with 2,000 trained rodents. “My only anxiety was: I love animals! I was afraid of stepping on them. But fortunately, that didn’t happen. They were great co-stars.

Dafoe plays an eccentric occult expert in the film, which hits theaters Dec. 25 and follows a woman terrorized by a vampire. It’s a full circle for the actor, who played the original Nosferatu actor Max Schreck in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire. It is also his third film with writer-director Robert Eggers, after The lighthouse And The Northerner.

“He’s a great writer. He’s a great director. He knows my triggers,” Dafoe said. “I enter the world he creates and he tells me what to do. I feel engaged. I feel inspired. He’s a good guy.

“I want to be in all his movies,” he added with a laugh.

Dafoe said Eggers had a gift for making films “from another time” that “still feel so real and relevant.”

“As an actor, having this opportunity to find another way of being, another way of thinking (and) to have another perspective on our lives is beautiful,” he continued. “He’s the whole package.”

Emma Corrin, who uses they/them pronouns, plays a close friend of the film’s protagonist. They told Yahoo Entertainment that they were honored to receive a letter from Eggers asking them to participate. Nosferatu.

“I was just like, ‘Yeah, I don’t need to see anything. I’ll do whatever you want!’ ” Corrin said. “Then I read the script and it was just beautiful. He writes these incredible, long, prose descriptions of scenes, and you can instantly see what he’s going for. It was sort of a no-brainer.

Eggers’ enthusiasm for his work earned him a reputation as a “visionary,” as Corrin describes him. But Nosferatu was a particularly significant project for the director. He told Yahoo Entertainment that, in many ways, it was his most personal film to date.

“I’ve always loved vampires since I can remember,” he said. “My first Halloween costume that I chose was that of the Count of Sesame Street. I saw Nosferatu for the first time when I was 9 years old and I fell in love with it.

Eggers directed a high school theater adaptation of it, which was later taken up by a local professional theater impressed by his work.

“Nosferatu has always been a part of who I am,” he said. “I came to this (project) without any fatigue and with the feeling of making a first feature film, because it has the energy of things I have lived with for a long time.”

“But of course, it’s not enough to be stupid about it. There has to be a reason to do it,” he added.

The original Nosferatu is a 1922 German expressionist silent film directed by FW Murnau. It was based on the vampire story from the 1897 book. Dracula by Bram Stoker but features different characters. Eggers Nosferatu takes the original film’s female victim, Ellen Hutter, and makes her the main character.

“I was excited to tell the story through the eyes of a female protagonist, which had never been done before,” Eggers said. “Murnau makes Ellen the heroine from the last act, but I thought if we started with Lily-Rose Depp’s character from the beginning and experienced it through her eyes… the film could be more complex psychologically and emotionally.”

To prepare for writing the screenplay, Eggers first wrote a Nosferatu short story. He wanted to understand the story of his characters, even if many are never seen on screen.

“One thing people ask me (is if it’s) difficult to tell a story that has been told so many times,” he said. ” It’s true ! But there are some advantages, which allow you to see what always works, what sometimes works, what never works and what is always missing.

Nosferatu himself, also known as Count Orlok, is played by Bill Skarsgård. The film’s marketing has yet to spoil his appearance in the role, instead focusing on the character’s sinister coffin. There is something new popcorn bucket coffin-shaped for sale, along with a whopping $20,000 replica of the sarcophagus.

Eggers said he was surprised that this was the main imagery that emerged from the film, but he’s not crazy about it.

“Myself and Craig Lathrop, the decorator, spent a lot of time thinking about the coffin,” he said. “Willem always talks about the fact that I don’t show anything in my films. You know they are there. We experience them as the characters experience them and no more.

He agreed that the ancient vampire bed is really cool, and he can’t wait for people to see all the “cool details.”

“There are fucking skulls everywhere and stuff. It’s a really cool casket,” Eggers said.

Nosferatu is in theaters December 25.