Lily-Rose Depp: Isabelle Adjani’s ‘Iconic’ Performance in ‘Possession’ Was an Inspiration for ‘Nosferatu’

Lily-Rose Depp is emulating another Ellen Hutter (and another French starlet) for her breakout turn in Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu“: Isabelle Adjani. In a recent interview, Depp told IndieWire that, while Adjani’s portrayal of Ellen Hutter in Werner Herzog’s 1979 feature “Nosferatu the Vampyre” no doubt was a touchstone for her own take on the fictional character, it was Adjani’s “Possession” performance that directly inspired Depp’s standout role.

“I thought a lot about ‘Possession,’ of course,” Depp said. “Isabelle Adjani has an incredible and iconic performance in that. She also was an Ellen of the past [in Werner Herzog’s 1979 ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’] and so I was very honored to carry the French girl Baton to play Ellen in this version. She’s an actress that inspires me a lot.”

Adjani’s career became synonymous with Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 thriller “Possession,” in which she starred as a woman who descends into madness after running away from her marriage, causing her husband (Sam Neill) to discover the sinister nature of her infidelities. (“Possession” was recently announced to be getting the “reimagination” treatment by actor/producer Robert Pattinson and “Smile” writer/director Parker Finn.)

Adjani won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival but allegedly attempted suicide following the film’s release due to the extreme emotional and psychic demands of her performance. She later told Interview that the production was one of “great violence that I agreed to take on.” Adjani added that she considers herself to be “a survivor” after the immersive experience required for the role. 

The parallels between the supernaturally plagued marriage in “Possession” and the twisted love triangle in Eggers’ “Nosferatu” between Depp’s Ellen, her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and the titular demon, Count Orlok (Bill Skårsgard), are quite evident. In the film, Orlok possesses Ellen’s mind and body as she sleeps, but his evil also infiltrates Thomas’ confidence, further emasculating him at the start of their marriage, by way of a little bit of undead cuckholding.

In the film, Depp’s Ellen violently writhes during Orlok’s perverse subconscious visits to her, and her filmmaker was determined to use as little CGI as possible for these demanding sequences. Instead, Depp had limited takes for the possession scenes. When asked if there was ever any debate over using CGI instead during particularly grueling sequences to get more takes, Depp said, “That’s not something that we ever discussed, honestly. Rob is a very practical filmmaker and he wants everything to be real.”

She continued, “I mean, even Bill in the movie, his physical appearance and the voice and everything is completely unaltered. That’s what it was. And same for my very physical movement. That was always going to be real. I feel like I tried to just embrace it in a way, almost as a tool, into the character because those physical moments are an externalization of the internal war that she’s traversing. I tried to almost use the physicality as like a way into the emotion and vice versa.”

Depp worked with various specialists to learn how to move in character. “As far as the physical stuff, Rob introduced me to Japanese butoh, which is a Japanese performance art dance form, which at the core of is this idea of letting your consciousness and yourself kind of float away from your physical body. You become an empty vessel for something else to take over,” Depp said. “That was incredibly inspiring to me. I also worked [with a] movement coach who was incredibly helpful, and we kind of mapped out all those movements and then tried to infuse them with an emotion that felt true. They were more than just physical movements, but also infused with a real pain and a real kind of insight into what kind of internal battle she was going through.”

Focus Features will release “Nosferatu” in theaters on Wednesday, December 25.