Nosferatu’s Robert Eggers Gave Nicholas Hoult Some Unusual Acting Advice

Nicholas Hoult has been on a bit of a run of late. Having lost the role of Batman to fellow Brit Robert Pattinson in “The Batman,” the actor will soon play Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s upcoming “Superman” after having similarly lost the lead role to David Corenswet. Still, not getting to play Superman almost makes Hoult the perfect Lex Luthor, and it will certainly be interesting to see what the actor does as the Man of Steel’s most famous foe. In the lead up to that high-profile role, however, Hoult has been raising his profile and demonstrating his range with a slew of 2024 films that range from animated comedies to searing crime dramas.

After appearing alongside Nicholas Cage in the anticlimactic “Renfield” in 2023, Hoult seemingly went into 2024 determined to keep his career afloat. He voiced Jon Arbuckle in “Garfield,” then starred in Clint Eastwood’s legal thriller “Juror #2,” which could have been a big box office hit had Warner Bros. not made the bizarre decision to basically abandon the movie. He also delivered a quietly impressive turn as the leader of a white supremacist group in Justin Kurzel’s underseen but excellent “The Order.” Then came arguably his biggest role of the year, with Hoult playing 19th Century real estate agent and doting husband Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers’ remake of “Nosferatu.”

With “Nosferatu,” Eggers resurrected a vampire classic in the form of a scary fever dream that maintains the director’s signature style of immersing viewers in a strikingly historically accurate yet intoxicatingly fantastical netherworld. While Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter is the star of Eggers’ film, it’s Thomas Hutter that first encounters Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok/Nosferatu, and is just as big a part of the narrative as Depp’s character. As such, Hoult evidently took this particular role seriously enough to get a little caught up in the mechanics of his performance — to the extent that Eggers gave him some acting advice that he himself had learned from the man who won the role of Batman over Hoult: Robert Pattinson.

Understandably, Nicholas Hoult was both happy and sad that he didn’t play the title role in “The Batman,” calling the loss of the role to Robert Pattinson an “emotional blow.” At least with his role as Lex Luthor, Hoult will form part of the new DC Universe moving forward. But it seems before he had a chance to establish himself in James Gunn’s burgeoning shared universe, he was getting a little too in his head about portraying Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers’ gothic nightmare fairytale “Nosferatu.”

Talking to the BFI, Eggers revealed that at the very beginning of shooting, Hoult was having a tough time portraying Hutter’s fear. So, the director borrowed some unorthodox acting methods from his “The Lighthouse” star Robert Pattinson and suggested them to Hoult.

Alongside Willem Defoe (who also appears as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz in “Nosferatu”), Pattinson led Eggers’ second studio movie “The Lighthouse,” in which he played lighthouse keeper Ephraim Winslow. The role was a challenge for the “Twilight” star, with Pattinson claiming to have been forever changed by his experience making the film after employing seemingly every acting method he could in order to embody his emotionally unwell character. At the time, he surely wasn’t aware that his unusual methods would somehow make their way to Hoult via Eggers, but that’s exactly what happened when the “Nosferatu” star similarly found himself struggling with a particular scene.

Robert Eggers wasn’t afraid to get rough while filming “The Lighthouse,” putting his stars through what sounds like some of the most emotionally and physically testing experiences either are likely to have endured. Thankfully for him, both actors not only got on with the job, but in Robert Pattinson’s case, were seemingly willing to get as rough as the director. In his BFI interview, Eggers recalled the shooting experience, saying:

“Rob was doing more, he’s not method, but he was doing more, like, method things to get into the zone. He would spin around and make himself dizzy before a take and he would jam his fingers down his throat to almost gag himself to have his eyes be crazy.”

While it might not have convinced Pattinson’s co-star Willem Dafoe, who according to Eggers seemed incredulous when faced with this unusual behavior, these exact methods came in handy on “Nosferatu.” Eggers continued:

“Then, I was working with Nicholas Hoult on the first weeks of ‘Nosferatu’ and he needed to be terrified and he needed to be out of his mind. He is a very very good technical actor and also, like, a very emotional actor, but he was also […] too in his head. So I was like, ‘Why don’t you spin around the room and gag yourself.'”

For some reason, while I can totally picture Robert Pattiinson gagging himself on-set, it’s hard to imagine Hoult doing the same. But it seems Eggers wasn’t joking, with the director also speaking to Dazed Magazine about helping Hoult get out of his head. “Nick worried about giving the right performance and being scared enough,” he said. “At times he’d over-intellectualise what was going on because he cared so much about being the character. It got in his head.” Eggers explained how he “learned from Pattinson” on “The Lighthouse” and “encouraged Nick to shove his fingers down his throat, and gag himself, and spin around in circles until he was dizzy,” which according to the filmmaker did the trick. “Once we did a bit of that, he no longer needed it. He was like, ‘OK, this is what we’re doing here.'”

I’m not sure whether Hoult stuck his fingers down his throat for James Gunn and “Superman,” but if so, it will be a heck of a legacy for Pattinson’s “Lighthouse” methods to become a foundational part of the new DC Universe.