What makes Bill Skars­gård so monstrous?

In F. W. Murnau’s orig­i­nal 1922 film Nos­fer­atu, Max Schreck was so ter­ri­fy­ing as Count Orlok that an urban leg­end grew sug­gest­ing he was in fact a real mon­ster. While Schreck’s pass­ing in 1936 put paid to any far-fetched claims of immor­tal­i­ty, it’s a tes­ta­ment to the endur­ing nature of his per­for­mance that audi­ences would ques­tion whether he was super­nat­ur­al. For Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake of the same name, he cast an actor whose career might have once sparked sim­i­lar rumours: Swedish actor Bill Skars­gård has played a vari­ety of roles in his 24-year career, but the ones that have earned the most atten­tion tend to be those with a con­nec­tion to the dark side. Just what is it that makes this good-look­ing, pub­licly mild-man­nered star so great at play­ing the stuff of nightmares?

The most lit­er­al exam­ple of Skarsgård’s affin­i­ty for the mon­strous is his role in Andy Muschi­et­ti adap­tion of Stephen King’s It. In both 2017’s Part One and 2019’s Part Two, Skars­gård played Pen­ny­wise The Danc­ing Clown (one of the most com­mon forms the tit­u­lar shapeshift­ing alien mon­ster takes). Like Count Orlok, Pen­ny­wise had famous­ly been played before, by Tim Cur­ry in the 1990 TV minis­eries. Where Cur­ry took the form of a con­tem­po­rary cir­cus clown with some snarky gags and a grav­el­ly car­ni­val bark­er type voice, Skars­gård goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion to his pre­de­ces­sor, adopt­ing a child­like voice and demeanour which only adds to the sin­is­ter inten­tions lying beneath. His make­up and cos­tume come from anoth­er era, becom­ing part of the over­all per­for­ma­tive nature of the char­ac­ter, who opts for elab­o­rate scares to ter­rorise the chil­dren of Derry.

This mod­ern take feels more super­nat­ur­al than Cur­ry, part­ly due to advance­ments in com­put­er effects, but also due to some innate qual­i­ties with­in Skars­gård. Pennywise’s unset­tling smile came from a child­hood game Skars­gård would play with his broth­ers where he would pre­tend to be a mon­ster. Like­wise, Muschi­et­ti was plan­ning to dig­i­tal­ly give the char­ac­ter a wall-eyed appear­ance, only for his star to men­tion that he can move his eyes in that way nat­u­ral­ly. It is as if Skars­gård had pre­pared all his life to play this embod­i­ment of child­hood fears. ​“There’s like all these dif­fer­ent things that I’ve been mean­ing to put into a char­ac­ter,” he told Enter­tain­ment Tonight, ​“then [Pen­ny­wise] appeared and I put all these things togeth­er to make as much of a weird, dis­turb­ing per­for­mance as possible”.

The suc­cess of Muschietti’s It led the actor to take on anoth­er hal­lowed role, this time as Eric in Rupert Sanders’ vision of The Crow (2024). The film stood in the shad­ow of Alex Proyas’ 1994 adap­ta­tion, star­ring the late Bran­don Lee which became a cult clas­sic. Skars­gård is once again a super­nat­ur­al being brought back to earth, although this time he’s ter­ror­is­ing mur­der­ous drug lords rather than inno­cent chil­dren. After he and his lover (FKA Twigs) are mur­dered, he is res­ur­rect­ed to ​“put the wrong things right”, although his pres­ence is more mon­strous than Lee’s florid per­for­mance. In the film’s third act, he emerges as a demon of vengeance with black tat­too ink run­ning over his eyes like warpaint, tilt­ing his head unnerv­ing­ly as he con­sid­ers the best way to dis­patch his prey. Immune to gun­fire, walks relent­less­ly towards his attack­ers, jerk­ing awk­ward­ly as the bul­lets hit him. Far from being an aveng­ing angel, he has become an instru­ment of death.

This state of being is suc­cinct­ly described dur­ing a face-off with Mar­i­on (Lau­ra Birn), the right-hand woman of the man who killed him. Look­ing at Eric, she described the slow fall of evil­do­ing – ​“you’re swal­lowed up, and the only direc­tion you can go is down”. Coat­ed in the blood of oth­ers, he gives a bit­ter nod of recog­ni­tion, before Mar­i­on describes him as hav­ing ​“the look of some­one who hates every­thing inside of him”. While his cru­sade is one pro­pelled by love, to tru­ly become the demon his ene­mies fear, he drains him­self of the good­ness that his rela­tion­ship gave him. To save his lover’s soul, he became a monster.

This brings us to Count Orlok – a char­ac­ter who does not share Eric’s noble inten­tions for blood­shed. His image has been kept from the film’s pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al, shown main­ly in shad­ow or through close-ups of his clawed hand reach­ing out. There­fore, when we meet him, the shock is the same as that of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the woman whom Orlok calls ​“my afflic­tion”. Through Eggers’ lens, Skars­gård becomes a mix­ture of the erot­ic and ani­mal­is­tic. The Count begins to embody the dark­er side of our natures, feed­ing on our dark­est secrets in a way that would make him a ter­ror to the but­toned-down sen­si­bil­i­ties of the mid-19^th Cen­tu­ry, when the film is set. Visu­al­ly, that sin­is­ter glare that made Pen­ny­wise so unset­tling peers from beneath his exten­sive pros­thet­ics, while his deep accent­ed voice appears like an echo from the beyond. Far from the caped suave­ness of Bela Lugosi’s Drac­u­la, or the glit­tery angst of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, Skars­gård con­torts his very being into the orig­i­nal source of vam­pir­ic fear, that of being con­sumed by darkness.

After hav­ing ter­ri­fied cin­e­ma audi­ences as Count Orlok, Skars­gård will be return­ing to the role of Pen­ny­wise in the TV spin-off IT: Wel­come To Der­ry. It seems his asso­ci­a­tion with crea­tures of the night shows no sign of stop­ping, and the actor him­self has admit­ted it is a ​“mutu­al kind of attrac­tion”. ​“I think those char­ac­ters are drawn to me as much as I’m drawn to them,” he told Van­i­ty Fair. ​“The fact that they’re drawn towards me is a bunch of dif­fer­ent rea­sons, every­thing from the way you look, you have a sen­si­bil­i­ty, there’s a dark­ness about you, or there’s an inten­si­ty.” Max Schreck moved away from the role that gave him infamy, with Orlok being the only hor­ror role of his career. His suc­ces­sor, how­ev­er, seems born to haunt our screens.