“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.
