The Northman is the next film from director Robert Eggers (The VVitch, The Lighthouse) and it’s hitting theatres next month with a star-studded cast. Alexander Skarsgård will be joined by Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Björk as well as Marvel stars Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe. Hawke just made his MCU debut today in Disney+’s Moon Knight, and Dafoe recently reprised his role as Green Goblin in Spider-Man: No Way Home. During a recent interview with GQ, Hawke opened up about working with Dafoe on The Northman and shared a tidbit about their shared scene.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“It’s like you found some epic Viking poem that’s 700 years old and brought it to life,” Hawke explained before talking about getting to work with one of his heroes, Dafoe, for the second time (they previously starred in Daybreakers together back in 2009). “We have one amazing scene. We get naked and do some kind of Viking acid and howl at the moon together. And oh my god, if you have to be naked and howl at the moon, he’s a great person to do it with.”
Eggers previously spoke to Collider about making the upcoming film.
“The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself,” Eggers revealed. “That’s been a challenge with the new movie…There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films.”
He added, “There’s a lot more storyboarding. Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.”
The Northman lands in theaters on April 22nd. You can currently catch Hawke in the first episode of Moon Knight on Disney+, and Dafoe in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is being released on DVD and Blu-ray on April 12th.
