Nicholas Hoult says Robert Eggers gifted him Bill Skarsgård's prosthetic penis from Nosferatu: It's 'framed at home'

Nothing could’ve prepared Nicholas Hoult for the Nosferatu wrap gift that he received from director Robert Eggers. 

The actor revealed in a recent Elle video that the director mailed him the prosthetic penis that Bill Skarsgård wore in his portrayal of the vampire Count Orlok as a way to commemorate his time on the long-awaited horror film.

"I have Count Orlok's prosthetic penis framed at home,” Hoult told his costar Lily-Rose Depp. “There’s a scene where Bill Skarsgård is slurping my blood and Robert Eggers asked, ‘How was that for you?’ … And I said, ‘I could feel his prosthetic penis on my leg.'"

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So, naturally, when Hoult wrapped filming, Eggers gifted him the prop so that the actor would always be able to gaze upon it and remember the experience. "Rob got it framed and sent to my house,” he recalled. “But the frame had broken when it got there, so I had to take it to a local frame shop and I had to be like, ‘Hey, dude, can you fix this?’”

Although the framer initially appeared fine with the request, Hoult noted that the man did have a few questions when he returned to collect the prop. 

“He kind of didn’t even blink the first time, and then when I went back to pick it up, I think he had clocked how weird it was — what I was framing, potentially, like, this vampire penis?” Hoult said. “And he was like, ‘Is this some kind of collector’s piece?’”

Hoult added, “I was like, ‘Yeah, you could say that.’”

The 35-year-old stars as Thomas Hutter — an unlucky estate agent tasked with helping Count Orlok (Skarsgård) purchase a residence in his town — in Eggers’ reimagining of the legendary silent horror film, which itself was famously unofficially adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In one scene in Eggers' film, Orlok becomes aroused after witnessing Hutter accidentally cut himself and begin bleeding.

The prop was one of many prosthetic pieces that, combined together, contributed to Skarsgård’s almost unrecognizable transformation into the vampire. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly last month, Skarsgård revealed that he prepared for the role by studying with an opera coach to lower his voice an entire octave and sending Voice Memos to Eggers until they found Orlok's perfect, ominous tone.

“The character is somewhat paradoxical because he's very powerful and demanding, but there's something frail about him, as well, because he's a corpse,” Skarsgård explained. “So the voice needs to be very powerful, but at the same time, there needs to be some sort of fragility or almost pain and labor in his breathing and talking.”

Nosferatu moves into cinemas on Dec. 24. Watch Hoult talk about the prosthetic in the clip above.