Every Actor Who Has Played Nosferatu (And What They Look Like Without Makeup)

The story of the infamous vampire Count Dracula has spanned over a century and has served as the source for countless adaptations on stage, screen, and television. This year, though, there’s no more notable adaptation than the upcoming remake of “Nosferatu” (read our glowing review here). The original film, from 1922 and director F.W. Murnau, is one of the seminal pieces of horror filmmaking, establishing a more disturbing and terrifying template for vampires than future iterations of the more recognizably seductive version of Dracula played by everyone from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman. The new film, from celebrated indie filmmaker Robert Eggers, is meant to give us a distinctive and unique depiction of the creepy Eastern European Count whose hermetic lifestyle masks the fact that he thrives on human blood. 

Though the trailers for the remake have (accurately) promised an atmospheric, spooky, and altogether unnervingly nightmarish account of this classic horror story, the one piece kept literally in the shadows is what Bill Skarsgård is going to look like as the eponymous vamp. He’s not the first actor to play Nosferatu (in fact, in a roundabout way, one of his co-stars has also played Nosferatu), which requires an intense transformation. Five men now have played Nosferatu, and each of them looks markedly different in real life as they did after undergoing extensive makeup and hair regimens to play the baddie, so let’s take a look.

With more than 100 years of cultural legacy to consider, it’s still pretty remarkable to consider the risk inherent in making “Nosferatu” in 1922. Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” had been successful enough to merit adaptations, but few were as daring as F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, in part because it was completely unlicensed (one of a few reasons why the eponymous character is known as Count Orlok, not Count Dracula) and in part because Murnau was relying on the relatively unknown Max Schreck to play the character. The upside to using such an unknown performer, who had only appeared in a couple of other silent films before going through some makeup work to adopt the look of the disturbing Orlok, was that audiences of the era would have no built-in expectations of who Schreck was or the type of performance he might give. 

In fact, Schreck’s performance was so powerful (and the actor was never able to achieve success with his future work) that some people assumed that this was a case of true Method acting before the term existed. In short, they thought he was a vampire. (Put a pin in that thought, because we’ll get into that in more detail soon.) Schreck wasn’t a vampire, of course, just an actor able to give extreme and chill-inducing life to a man embodying the undead. Murnau’s film is fascinating to watch a century later for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that this established a foundation for German Expressionist cinema, with its canted angles, its shadowy designs, and its bleak outlook. 

Murnau would become one of the most celebrated silent filmmakers to ever live; a few years later, he would direct another masterpiece, “Sunrise: A Tale of Two Lovers,” which was as far away as possible from this seminal horror classic. But Murnau was fortunate to collaborate with the enigmatic Schreck, whose intense and peering gaze is about the only thing you can spot between the two photos glimpsed above. (Though in the photo on the left, he looks much more imperious, like a forebear of the great British horror icon Peter Cushing.) Although Schreck would continue acting in films until 1936, his biggest role remains one of his first. That doesn’t mean his legacy stopped with this film, as some younger audiences no doubt hear the name “Max Schreck” and think of Tim Burton’s 1992 superhero sequel “Batman Returns,” featuring Christopher Walken as a non-vampiric baddie with the same name.

Because of the nature of the original “Nosferatu,” there’s an added fascination to the 1979 remake “Nosferatu the Vampyre.” It’s not just the fact that the film marked one of several collaborations between the iconic German filmmaker Werner Herzog and star Klaus Kinski, although that does help out quite a lot. It’s that Herzog wound up remaking both “Nosferatu” and “Dracula” in the same go. While the title of the film is both a deliberate nod to the Murnau masterpiece and a clear enough reminder to audiences that this is a horror film, the character played by Kinski is called … Count Dracula. 

Yes, while the title of the film calls back to the Murnau movie, as does the makeup that Kinski had to don each day of the production, Herzog’s version of this quintessential story is very much in line with what Stoker wrote. Certainly, anyone familiar enough with the broad strokes of the Stoker story will recognize from Murnau’s film (as well as the Eggers remake about which more shortly) which characters align with those in the book. But to watch Herzog’s film is an even more uncanny experience because of how smoothly and swiftly he blends his two specific inspirations.

Kinski, for his part, was the kind of actor very much in line with the others who will be covered in this article. Yes, he indeed had to undergo a four-hour transformation each day in the makeup chair to have the bald head, the pale skin, the pointed teeth, the stretched-back ears, and the long fingernails of the Schreck-esque version of Nosferatu. But Kinski was the type of performer whose dynamic and elastic face was such that he was always as compelling without makeup as he was when portraying the moody vampire. 

That is one of the more notable aspects of Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre” — the familiarity with some of the key actors. Even if you’re not steeped in German cinema of the 1970s, you’d likely remember Kinski from films like “For a Few Dollars More” or co-stars like Isabelle Adjani (as Lucy Harker) from “Possession” or “Ishtar”, and Bruno Ganz (as Jonathan Harker) from “Wings of Desire” or as Hitler in “Downfall.” (Yes, that’s Ganz in the Hitler-shouting meme we’ve all seen a million times.) Kinski’s take on Nosferatu, thus, is both effectively creepy but a little familiar. Certainly, he’s not attempting to be suave like Bela Lugosi was, but aside from bringing the Count into the world of color film, this “Nosferatu” ends up as a hybrid that can’t hope to top its standard-breaking predecessor.

If you’re a child of the 1990s, then you know of the unique cultural power of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” Before kids fell in love with the “Goosebumps” series of book and TV episodes, they adored the surprisingly edgy and genuinely spooky Saturday-night anthology series in which a group of kids would call upon each other to tell a scary story for their approval. In one such episode, “The Tale of the Midnight Madness,” a couple of teenage kids get involved with a strange movie theater and an equally strange vampire film about — who else? — Nosferatu. The movie-within-the-show is called “Nosferatu: The Demon Vampire,” and it very much is a riff on the German horror classic, with the lanky character actor Christopher Heyerdahl donning the disturbing makeup to play Count Orlok, as the evil vamp leaves the black-and-white world of his film and into the real world. (Heyerdahl is well-known for appearing in the “Twilight” films and TV shows like “The Last of Us” and “Caprica.”) 

Now, although the mysterious Dr. Vink introducing the film in the episode says that his movie is unique because the vampire wins, Count Orlok does not win the day even in a show that could sometimes pull the rug out from under its young audience. As is the case in a couple of the other versions recounted here, Nosferatu does lose but not before he’s depicted as being awfully, awfully creepy. Even on a low-budget TV show like “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, in which characters could sometimes befall mildly grisly fates but in ways that feel a bit cheesy or chintzy, the small-screen depiction of Count Orlok is pretty disturbing. Though, even as you can see from the photo above, the makeup is a little more cartoonish and outsized (compared with any of the big-screen adaptations), Heyerdahl is eminently icky as the fabled vampire. He also has the benefit of being extremely tall; even in the new film, though Orlok hulks over his prey, it doesn’t quite have the same effect as someone who just seems a few inches too tall and too thin skulking and stalking potential victims. 

You may recall that earlier in this article, we noted that when “Nosferatu” was released in 1922, Max Schreck was so unknown to the German populace that audiences assumed the actor wasn’t an actor at all, but was an actual vampire who had somehow been placed into a film about such creatures. While that wasn’t true, the premise of the pitch-black satire “Shadow of the Vampire” is, in essence … what if Schreck was a vampire? More importantly, what if F.W. Murnau knew that Schreck was a vampire and wanted to film his Gothic epic without having to worry about Schreck thirsting for the blood of his co-stars or others on the set? As much as “Shadow of the Vampire,” by director E. Elias Merhige and writer Steven Katz, is sharply funny, it also relies heavily on who could possibly bring Schreck to life in just the right way. Enter one of the finest actors working today in America: Willem Dafoe. As is the case with Kinski, Dafoe is an actor whose work was already plenty familiar to audiences around the world. 

Although he would appear as the nefarious Green Goblin two years later in “Spider-Man,” Dafoe had already starred in everything from the Best Picture winner “Platoon” to the goofy action dreck of “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” proving as adept at outlandish villainy as he was at intense pathos. Considering the long and illustrious career he’s had, it’s no surprise that Dafoe underwent an astonishing transformation to play Schreck-as-Nosferatu. It’s also no surprise that the Academy Awards nominated him for his supporting performance, as well as the team that did the makeup and hairstyling. By the year 2000, even audiences who may not have seen the film “Nosferatu” no doubt recognized the image above of the disturbingly bald-headed vampire with his strange teeth and pointed, bat-like ears. 

As such, the challenge was obvious: how do you effectively bring to life the image of such an iconic figure? The benefit of the Murnau film being silent is that Dafoe had no voice to have to align with, but the visual aspect of his performance is so critical, and he as well as the makeup team nailed it perfectly. “Shadow of the Vampire” is, in general, a delightfully savage take on the film industry, as Schreck clashes with the fictional version of Murnau (played by John Malkovich) about getting his character just right while, in the process, killing quite a lot of the cast and crew. One other fun fact: this film was produced by none other than Nicolas Cage, who had originally wanted to play Schreck himself. It would take him nearly a quarter-century to play a take on Dracula, in the horror comedy “Renfield,” in which Nicholas Hoult plays the title sycophant. But let’s not talk about Hoult too much … for now.

When we talk about actors with expressive faces working today, it’s hard not to think of Bill Skarsgård first. The young actor, younger brother of Alexander and son of Stellan, has already made a huge footprint in modern horror by playing Pennywise the Clown in the two-part adaptation of “It” from Warner Bros. Whatever else is true of that extended duo of films, Skarsgård created a genuinely horrifying and distinctive version of the character from Stephen King’s novel (and previously portrayed by Tim Curry on TV), almost from his very first scene. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s clearly not scared of taking over an iconic role. And yet, even if you can just make it out from the image above, it is clear that Eggers has something a little bit different in mind for his take on “Nosferatu.” 

Unlike the Herzog film, Skarsgård is not playing Count Dracula; he’s only ever referred to as Count Orlok. And you can tell from the image here, but let’s make it clear (without going too far into spoiler territory): Skarsgård’s Count Orlok does not look like the Nosferatu discussed in the previous three sections of this article. Outside of one moment in the pre-title scene, which has also been glimpsed in the trailer (in which Ellen Hutter is terrorized by a figure glimpsed in shadows who looks exactly like the old-school Orlok), this new take on the vampire is bigger, stranger, and more disturbing.

It’s also worth noting that Skarsgård is more often heard here than seen. Although Eggers’ version of “Nosferatu,” (which, to be clear, is excellent), mostly hits on the same plot beats from previous iterations, it’s moodier, more steeped in bleak atmosphere, and more reliant on depicting Orlok in the shadows. Even though the hapless Thomas Hutter (the aforementioned Hoult, who does impotent wide-eyed terror quite well) interacts with Orlok early in the story to facilitate a land deal that’s a facade for the vampire’s true villainy, you can only somewhat make out this hulking figure until very late in the proceedings. Moreover, even when viewed in the shadows of Germany, Skarsgård’s take on Orlok is among the most remarkable transformations an actor has undergone since Charlize Theron in “Monster.” 

Skarsgård’s voice (heard early and often) is booming, off-kilter, and imperious. It’s as if the horror movie trope of the slow-moving but implacable killer was recreated vocally only. It’s an impressive and effective technique that only adds to the pulse-pounding fear that the film creates from its first scene. Make no mistake: this version of “Nosferatu” is remarkable to behold, in large part because Skarsgård and Eggers have partnered effectively on redoing one of the most iconic and legendary figures of genre film, from visual to aural design.