“My toxic trait is that I have to collect all the world’s [Wales] Bonner,” Emma Corrin offers as they flop into an ornate mahogany chair with a family crest on the back. The Nosferatu star is, of course, talking about Grace Wales Bonner—the It-girl designer from London best known for her inspired athleisure collections with Adidas, including those leopard-print Sambas last spotted on comedy queen Ayo Edebiri.
Corrin is no stranger to fashion. As we speak, they’ve just helped Miu Miu usher in the festive season by fronting its Christmas campaign. Today, they have just wrapped up their Who What Wear shoot and have changed into their own Wales Bonner sweatshirt and blue R13 jeans. Their chestnut hair is cut in a pixie cut—though, they also look badly in need of a woolly hat given how they’re shivering. After all, we’re in the beautiful, if freezing, anteroom of a former Tudor monastery nestled in a quiet courtyard just a few minutes away from the bustling streets of central London. Fourteenth-century English monks, it seems, were not fans of central heating.
As Corrin politely requests a hot water bottle from someone on production, their Nosferatu co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson sweeps in, looking significantly warmer than both of us in a black Our Legacy coat and a gray hoodie. “I’ve gone for the coziest pair of 501s,” he says, pointing to his Levi’s as he settles into the chair next to Corrin. Did I mention that this former monastery now functions as a banquet hall for fancy dinners? There’s a thunderous metallic screech as someone wheels in a giant industrial fridge and dramatically leaves it in the middle of the room. “That’s Aaron’s fridge,” Corrin dryly remarks. “Very Nosferatu,” Taylor-Johnson says. “They’re going to bring a body out.”
The glacial temperature, the human-sized fridge, the fact that the building we’re in sits on a black death burial ground (seriously, I looked it up)—you couldn’t ask for a better location to talk to the stars of horror auteur Robert Eggers’s reimagining of the 1922 classic. The black-and-white original swaps the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel with the terrifying Count Orlok, who is brought to life in Eggers’s take by an unrecognizable, prosthetics-laden Bill Skarsgård. The Swedish actor didn’t look half as scary in real life, according to his co-stars. “Sometimes, he just had the head and hands on with gray sweats,” Corrin laughs.
The two actors play Anna and Friedrich Harding, a deeply sensible and madly-in-love couple who are dragged into a living nightmare when Anna’s best friend Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) begins to have ominous visions of a sharp-toothed suitor knocking on her door. The result is a dread-soaked, psychosexual phantasm of a film, the kind that will terrify and thrill in equal measure. One film critic noted that it has “more writhing sweatily in bed than any other movie ever made.”
Both stars confess that they aren’t actual horror fans, but they certainly looked the part on the set of today’s spookily gothic Who What Wear shoot. Earlier, I caught a glimpse of the two in all black looking like impossibly chic extras from an Addams Family reboot just before they were ushered through an ornate doorway that wouldn’t look out of place in Count Orlok’s castle. Even though it’s only 4 in the afternoon, it’s already pitch-black outside, and even the upbeat William DeVaughn soul track on the speakers can’t take away from the chill indoors.
“Are you good with horror?” Corrin inquires. I’m partial to a fright fest, I admit. “We’re both not,” they reply. Taylor-Johnson nods in affirmation: “I am not a horror-genre moviegoer.” Okay, but what about vampire films? He’s got two daughters and two stepdaughters. Surely, he’s seen Twilight.
He rolls his eyes theatrically. “They watch Twilight. I don’t watch it with them. I don’t even put it on,” he explains. Instead, both actors were drawn to Nosferatu because of Eggers, whose critically acclaimed oeuvre includes new-generation horror classics The Witch, which introduced Anya Taylor-Joy to audiences, and Robert Pattinson’s bonkers supernatural drama The Lighthouse. “His world-building is incredible,” says Corrin, who has graciously accepted a padded hot water bottle from someone and is cuddling it to their stomach. “It’s really immersive, all of the detail he goes into.” During the shoot, the pair would wander around the set for their home and find handwritten letters from Anna and Friedrich squirreled away in drawers. “That desk wasn’t part of the action. No one was going to see those letters,” Corrin explains. “But I think it’s that knowledge for Rob. He knows that they’re there.” Taylor-Johnson nods and adds, “That makes it feel like it’s grounded in some kind of reality.”
The two actors have had very different journeys to screen, even though they are just about six years apart and were born barely two hours’ drive away from each other – Corrin in leafy suburban Sevenoaks and Taylor-Johnson in the English market town of High Wycombe. Corrin is academic and went to the University of Cambridge to study a combined education, English and drama degree; Taylor-Johnson left school at 15, having already starred in his first film at ten. Corrin was still in boarding school while their co-star was busy with a burgeoning film career, with starring roles as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy and the titular hero of R-rated comic book adaption Kick-Ass. What they do share are bruising experiences with the spotlight – him thanks to a highly-publicised marriage to filmmaker and artist Sam Taylor-Johnson after they met on the set of Nowhere Boy, and Corrin after they were cast in their star making role as the young Princess Diana in Netflix mega-hit The Crown. For a young actor who had only just made their screen debut a year earlier with small TV roles, it was overwhelming: Paparazzi staked out filming locations to catch them decked out in full Princess of Wales attire. And both actors are no stranger to harsh speculation and baseless celebrity gossip mongering.
Today, both actors would clearly much rather talk about their work than their private lives, but it’s clear that real life can’t help bleeding into their work. When Taylor-Johnson read Eggers’s script, he says, he was struck by the similarities between the rat-infested plague that follows in Nosferatu’s footsteps and the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve seen how something very quickly went through communities with fear and terror,” he explains. “People lost loved ones, people hunkered down, and they changed. Our worlds just changed.” Corrin muses thoughtfully, “It’s like people needing something to pin fear and terror when it feels out of control. I guess that’s where myth comes from. It’s maybe more comforting to think it’s a monster.”
It’s clear that off-screen worries didn’t interfere with their time together. Though both actors have never worked together before, they now riff off each other with the easy familiarity of old college roommates. Recalling their favorite Czech restaurant on location in Prague, Corrin says, “It’s like a school canteen. Everyone sits together. … It’s my life’s mission to bring Kantyna to London.” “It’s [got a] very community vibe,” Taylor-Johnson adds. Corrin smiles: “Very good meat.” Then they’re both off to the races, filling the gaps in each other’s sentences, picking up as the other trails off, and trying to remember the name of the Czech pub they adored. “Very good beer,” Taylor-Johnson volunteers fondly, whipping out his phone and pulling up the Eastern European city on his Google Maps. The pair squints at the jumble of saved favorites sprinkled across the map.
In fact, the whole filming experience sounds very collegial. Even screen legend Willem Dafoe joined in with his younger co-stars on nights out. (“Lokál!” shouts Taylor-Johnson as he finally remembers the name of the pub.) It doesn’t quite fit with what I assumed would be happening during a remake of one of the creepiest films in cinematic history—a movie so shrouded in mystery that the original Count Orlok, an actor named Max Schreck, was rumored to be a bloodthirsty murderer. Did anything similarly spooky occur while they filmed Nosferatu?
Corrin says no, although their latest film 100 Nights of Hero—a feminist fantasy starring The Idea of You‘s Nicholas Galitzine and Charli XCX—didn’t quite escape as unscathed by the supernatural. “Yeah, it was haunted,” they say with typical understatement as Taylor-Johnson exclaims with excitement at the very idea. The sound guy, Corrin recalls, kept picking up interference on the mics: “There was a day where we were shooting, and there was this noise—a clanging, like someone was dragging a bin. No one could figure out where it was coming from because no one was making any noise, and it only started every time we shouted ‘Action.’ It was so weird.” Afterward, they googled ghost stories and found out that Knebworth House, the extravagant Tudor mansion they were filming at, is apparently haunted by two ghosts. “Fun, isn’t it?” Corrin grins.
Nosferatu, by contrast, sounded much less spooky. “No one felt scared or anything because of the subject matter,” Corrin shrugs. What it does sound like is hard work. Eggers would film up to 30 takes, letting each scene play for 10 minutes without yelling cut. The cast was drilled down to the last minute detail—even how to move their face and where to look so the light hit them just right. “It’s all very much like, ‘Hit your mark, look here, pick this cup up,'” Corrin explains. “It’s an incredible way of working. It’s like dance—beautiful.” They turn to Taylor-Johnson and add, “You and I both struggled with our eyebrows.”
“Me, in particular!” Taylor-Johnson explains. “I got a heads-up from Nick [Hoult, who plays Thomas Hutter] because Nick was the first in for about a month before anybody [was] shooting. He was like, ‘Just watch your eyebrows. … No eyebrow acting.'” He wiggles his resplendently expressive brows at me. “It’s a crutch for a lot of us,” Corrin deadpans. Without exception, however, the hardest day on set sounds like the scene in which Taylor-Johnson’s character finds their wife on the floor covered in Nosferatu’s rats. “I texted [Eggers] quite early when I read the script, and I was like, ‘So they’re gonna be CGI?'” Corrin says. “He was like, ‘No.'”
That’s how they found themselves topless on set with 20 rats running all over their body. “They were biting … and everything!” Taylor-Johnson says in real alarm, as if remembering the sight of rodents running all over his co-star. Corrin demurs modestly: “You know what? I was being quite brave about it. The smell is horrendous. It was the fact that they piss and shit constantly. For days after, I had all these scratches.”
Both stars aren’t strangers to demanding shoots or the big Hollywood machine. Taylor-Johnson has his new Marvel-Sony film Kraven the Hunter coming out this month (he plays the titular Kraven, a bloodthirsty game hunter), and Corrin spent the summer promoting Deadpool & Wolverine, in which they donned a bald cap and played the telekinetic supervillain Cassandra Nova. “I loved it,” they enthuse. It was the first time they’d dipped a toe into the world of comic book blockbusters, though they’d had a small part in the Batman TV spin-off series Pennyworth. Would they ever return to the Marvel universe? It’s a tall order, some might say, given that their character (spoiler alert) explosively dies at the end of the film. “Yeah, it is true,” they acknowledge. “But it’s Marvel—never say never.”
Out of the two, Taylor-Johnson had the most experience with working on multimillion-dollar IP. “My personal view on that is there’s no real stance of, like, one’s better than the other,” he muses. After fronting two Kick-Ass films, he appeared in Marvel films as Pietro Maximoff, the superspeed mutant. Next year, he’ll star in 28 Years Later, the sequel to Alex Garland’s post-apocalyptic zombie hit 28 Days Later. “They all come with different challenges,” he explains. “Doing a big studio movie, [there are] a lot more people involved in the creative. That doesn’t necessarily become a problem—it just becomes another way you have to collaborate, so you have to be really open to being able to do that and learn from it.” Corrin nods in agreement as he continues, “For me, it’s very much just the idea that I’m very lucky to play across most different genres.”
At this point, the chill in the air has started to creep even further into the room, and Corrin has slumped into a protective ball around their hot water bottle. Both actors perk up when I ask them to describe each other’s style. After all, they are bona fide fashion plates. Taylor-Johnson was just named Armani’s new style ambassador, and Corrin has a close working relationship with British super stylist Harry Lambert, whom they describe as a close friend—one who also collaborates with Harry Styles and their The Crown co-star Josh O’Connor.
“Emma’s always super stylish, even when they’re not trying to be,” Taylor-Johnson says immediately as Corrin cackles. They turn to Taylor-Johnson and say, “You can wear a hoodie and jeans and look very well turned out, whereas I think I look a bit like a teenage boy.” The red carpet, they add, is “not [their] natural habitat.” “It’s not my world either,” Taylor-Johnson protests. “I’m not, like, high fashion.”
What about Corrin’s stratospherically viral, Lambert-styled fashion moment when they went pants-less at Venice Film Festival in green Miu Miu underwear? “That was a complete accident. I just thought it was cool!” they say. Taylor-Johnson cuts in: “It was so banging. Your whole Miu Miu campaign is sick.” Then the two are at it again, bigging each other up, laughing, and joking like old friends. It may have taken a vampire movie to bring them together, but you get the feeling that it’s going to take death—or eternal life—to tear them apart.
(Image credit: Elliot James Kennedy. On Emma: Marni dress; Cartier necklace; Calzedonia tights; Roger Vivier shoes. On Aaron: Simone Rocha coat; Dries Van Noten trousers; Jimmy Choo shoes.)
Nosferatu is in theaters December 25.
Photographer: Elliot James Kennedy
Stylist: Gary David Moore
Makeup Artist for Emma Corrin: Gina Kane
Hairstylist for Emma Corrin: Daniel Martin
Groomer for Aaron Taylor-Johnson: Christine Blundell
Manicurist: Liia Zotova
Set Designer: Julia Dias
Video Director: Sinclair Jaspard Mandy
1st AC: Ondrej Rubar
Sound: Matteo Di Cugno
Producers: Town Productions and Lindsay Ferro
Creative Director: Alexa Wiley
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Writer: Zing Tsjeng
Copy Editor: Jaree Campbell
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