Nosferatu casting director reveals brutal reason Lily-Rose Depp nearly didn’t get the job
'I was like, “Absolutely no way to Lily-Rose Depp”.'
Nosferatu’s casting director has admitted she was adamantly against giving Lily-Rose Depp a main role in the horror movie because she ‘couldn’t act’.
The 25-year-old French American actress has been establishing her own name as an actress in Hollywood, separately to that of her famous parents – Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp, 61, and French musician and actress Vanessa Paradis, 52.
She’s appeared in films including Voyagers, Silent Night and Netflix’s The King, opposite Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson, as well as taking the lead role in The Weeknd’s much-maligned HBO TV series The Idol in 2023, which garnered the most attention of her career to that date.
But British casting director Kharmel Cochrane, who worked on Robert Eggers’ atmospheric vampire flick, has revealed Depp’s acting talents had left her far from convinced initially.
Discussing how she has been ‘an opinionated person from day one’ in her chosen profession – ‘I was the assistant who wouldn’t make tea’ – Cochrane revealed that she was not afraid to admit when she was wrong.
‘With Nosferatu, I was like, “Absolutely no way to Lily-Rose Depp”. I didn’t think she could act. I hadn’t seen anything that I thought could show she could act,’ Cochrane told the audience, including Metro, at the Sands International Film Festival of St Andrews on Saturday.
