Nicholas Hoult Recalls Working Alongside 5,000 Rats on ‘Nosferatu’

Nicholas Hoult had 5,000 new friends once he wrapped filming for Nosferatu… well, rodent friends.

The actor, who stars alongside Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard in Robert Eggers’ supernatural horror film, shared during a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show that the movie clearly had a “big rat budget.”

“I think we had like 5,000 rats,” Hoult recalled. “Some of them were trained as well. They were all trained, and I was like, ‘You couldn’t have trained all of them.’ There were certain pockets of them that were trained.”

“And they were incontinent rats, so it was kinda stinky,” he added as host Graham Norton quipped, “They’re not incontinent, they just don’t care. Why would they care? ‘Oh, I’ll hold it.’”

“I heard someone else say they were incontinent, it sounded smart,” Hoult said with a laugh. “You’re right, they’re just rats. They just pee and poo anywhere. Luckily, I just had to wade through them.”

Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 German film of the same name, is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and a terrifying vampire infatuated with her.

The Superman actor later recalled a specific scene involving the rats, however, it was Skarsgard who was left trauma bonding with the hairy rodents.

“He had this scene where he had to be kind of locked in a sarcophagus,” Hoult recounted. “And he was in there in the full kind of Count Orlok prosthetic makeup. He’s got contact lenses in, they kind of make him go blind. And he’s laying in there, and they’ve filled it with rats and he’s got maggots all over him as well. And then they close the lid as well, so he’s just trapped in there with them.”

He continued, “I did feel bad for him because then we’d do it a few times and I’d be pushing the sarcophagus and they’d be like, ‘Ah Nick, you’ve got to move your hand here or it’s got to be pushed a little bit quicker or whatever.’ I was like, ‘Sorry!’ They’d be like, ‘One more time Bill, because Nick…’ And I was like, ‘Oh, sorry!’”

Nosferatu hits theaters on Dec. 25.