Chris Columbus says executives suggested Mel Gibson to play the vampire Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu while the project was still seeking backing.
The suggestion left producer Columbus and director Eggers looking at each other in disbelief. Columbus described their reaction as feeling like they were “living in a surreal satire of a Hollywood situation.”
In a January 3, 2025 interview, Columbus said executives had proposed Gibson for Count Orlok before the project landed at Focus Features. He didn’t identify the executives or their companies.
Columbus, who directed Home Alone and the first 2 Harry Potter films, produced Nosferatu through Maiden Voyage Pictures. A week before naming Gibson, he’d described “hideous suggestions about who should star” and said Eggers “wasn’t going to shift.”
The remake had spent years struggling to get made. It was announced in 2015, and Eggers said in April 2022 that it’d already “fallen apart twice.”
He later said Focus was the first company to greenlight it, following “many false starts.” Columbus credited Focus executives Peter Kujawski and Kiska Higgs with supporting Eggers’s vision.
Bill Skarsgård ultimately played Orlok. Eggers had seen him as the middle-aged Pennywise in It Chapter Two and thought, “I think Bill can do Orlok.” By September 30, 2022, Skarsgård was attached to play the vampire in the Focus production.
Once the film got its green light, Columbus moved to Prague and spent 8 months working on it as a hands-on producer.
