In the sodden fields of 13th-century England, where the mist clings to the heather like a shroud and the full moon carves silver scars across the night sky, the line between human frailty and feral fury dissolves into something primal, something profane. It’s here, amid the thatch-roofed hovels and plague-riddled hamlets of Robert Eggers’ latest descent into historical horror, that Lily-Rose Depp sheds her luminous, modern-day veneer for a guise so raw and unrecognizable it could curdle the blood of even the most jaded cinephile. Set photos from the production of Werwulf, leaked just days ago from the fog-choked sets at Bourne Wood in Surrey, capture Depp not as the ethereal ingenue of Nosferatu or the sultry siren of The Idol, but as a dirt-streaked peasant woman whose hollowed cheeks and matted tresses speak of a life gnawed by want and whispered curses. Her eyes, those famously limpid pools of quiet rebellion, now burn with a haunted ferocity, framed by a simple linen coif smeared with the grime of endless toil. It’s a transformation so visceral, so utterly stripped of artifice, that it has ignited a firestorm of speculation and awe across social media, with fans and critics alike hailing it as the boldest reinvention in Depp’s young career—and a harbinger of the gothic savagery Eggers has in store.

Eggers, the 41-year-old auteur whose films are less movies than meticulously forged fever dreams, has built an empire on such metamorphoses. From the pious unraveling of The Witch (2015), where puritan dread bloomed into full-blown bedevilment, to the salt-crusted madness of The Lighthouse (2019), where Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe devolved into lobster-fishing lunatics spouting 19th-century argot, his work demands total surrender from his performers. The Northman (2022) saw Alexander Skarsgård hack through Viking viscera with a berserker’s blank-eyed rage, while last year’s Nosferatu—a reimagining of the silent-era vampire chiller that grossed over $300 million worldwide—cast Depp as Ellen Hutter, a porcelain-fragile bride whose erotic possession by Bill Skarsgård’s rat-toothed Count Orlok twisted innocence into insatiable hunger. That role, with its corseted constriction and candlelit pallor, already marked a departure for Depp, 26, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis whose early résumé skewed toward Chanel campaigns and festival-circuit flirtations. But Werwulf—Eggers’ self-proclaimed “darkest script yet”—pushes her into uncharted wilderness, trading velvet gowns for homespun rags, and the flickering gaslight of Transylvanian castles for the peat-reeking gloom of medieval moors.

The images themselves are a study in stark authenticity, snapped amid the controlled chaos of principal photography that kicked off in mid-October 2025 at Sky Studios Elstree. There she stands, Lily-Rose Depp, ankle-deep in the churned mud of a makeshift Anglo-Saxon village, her once-signature waves of honeyed hair scraped back into a utilitarian braid that speaks of dawn-to-dusk drudgery. No trace of the red-carpet glow that graced the Nosferatu premiere in December 2024—where she shimmered in a Schiaparelli gown evoking lunar eclipses—remains. Instead, her skin is weathered to a sallow sheen, dusted with the floury residue of communal baking or the soot of peat fires, her lips chapped and colorless against the encroaching chill. A rough-spun kirtle clings to her frame, its woolen weave hand-loomed to Eggers’ exacting specifications, evoking the scratchy realism of 13th-century serfdom. In one candid shot, she’s bent over a wooden trough, scrubbing linens with a ferocity that belies her slight build, water sluicing down her arms like rivulets of reluctant tears. Another catches her in profile, gazing into the middle distance with an expression that’s equal parts weary resignation and coiled menace—a village healer, perhaps, or a scorned bride harboring secrets that could summon the beast from the woods.

This deglamorization isn’t mere method-acting affectation; it’s the cornerstone of Eggers’ ethos, a director who once spent months consulting linguists to pepper The Northman with reconstructed Old Norse. For Werwulf, co-scripted with Icelandic poet Sjón—the visionary behind The Northman‘s mythic sprawl—Eggers has delved into medieval bestiaries and Anglo-Saxon chronicles, unearthing folklore where werewolves weren’t silver-bullet fodder but harbingers of divine wrath or clerical hysteria. The film, shot on lush 35mm stock in a square 1.37:1 aspect ratio that evokes the claustrophobia of illuminated manuscripts, unfolds in a Britain still scarred by the Norman Conquest, where Saxon holdouts whisper of shape-shifters as metaphors for cultural devouring. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, reuniting with Eggers after his feral turn as Amleth’s doomed brother in The Northman, embodies the titular werwulf—a cursed thegn, perhaps, whose lunar agonies manifest in the leaked images as a blood-smeared howl, his body arched in ecstatic torment amid a circle of torchlit villagers. Willem Dafoe, Eggers’ perennial collaborator from The Lighthouse‘s foghorn ravings, appears equally transmogrified: a gaunt, bearded elder with eyes like polished obsidian, clutching a staff carved with runic wards, his face a map of pious fanaticism. Ralph Ineson, the gravel-voiced patriarch of The Witch, rounds out the core quartet as a battle-hardened reeve, his broad shoulders hunched against the encroaching fog.

Depp’s role, shrouded in the production’s trademark secrecy, seems poised to anchor this ensemble maelstrom. Whispers from the set—fueled by craft services chatter and Elstree’s ever-leaky walls—paint her as Eadgyth, a herbalist widow whose herbal poultices mask a lineage of “cunning folk” attuned to the moon’s malignant pull. In Eggers’ hands, this isn’t your Universal Monsters romp with Lon Chaney Jr. gnashing at fog machines; it’s a psychosexual parable where the beast’s curse ripples through the body politic, turning neighbor against neighbor in inquisitorial frenzy. Depp’s Eadgyth, then, might serve as both beacon and breaking point: a woman whose visions—fleeting glimpses of furred shadows and crimson feasts—position her as the village’s reluctant seer, her “wild” transformation not lycanthropic but alchemical, a shedding of patriarchal piety for something savage and sovereign. The set photos hint at this duality: in one, her hands—callused and ink-stained from grinding mandrake roots—are raised in supplication or spellcraft, a crude iron cross dangling from her neck like a noose of borrowed faith. It’s a visual gut-punch, this once-ethereal starlet rendered as flesh-and-filth incarnate, her porcelain poise eroded to reveal the bone-deep resilience beneath.

What makes Depp’s evolution so electrifying is its echo of Eggers’ muse-making. In Nosferatu, she was the porcelain vessel for Orlok’s insatiable gaze, her Ellen a Victorian hysteric whose surrender to the vampire’s bite was both erotic apotheosis and feminist reclamation—a woman choosing devouring over diminishment. Critics raved about her restraint, The Guardian calling it “a performance of exquisite unraveling,” her subtle tremors conveying the terror of desire unmoored. But Werwulf demands more: physicality over poise, endurance over elegance. Production diaries, scarce as hen’s teeth from Eggers’ notoriously buttoned-up camp, describe grueling night shoots under artificial full moons, where the cast contended with prosthetic pelts, practical blood rigs, and dialect coaches drilling Middle English inflections—phrases like “Þu bist werwulf” (Thou art werewolf) spat with guttural authenticity. Depp, who arrived on set fresh from a The Idol backlash that saw her pilloried for its campy excess, has leaned into the immersion with a fervor that borders on monastic. “Lily’s not just acting the part; she’s living the curse,” a stand-in confided to Variety‘s production spy, recounting how she forwent modern comforts, subsisting on period-accurate pottage and herbal infusions to internalize Eadgyth’s emaciated edge.

This metamorphosis resonates on a meta level, mirroring Depp’s own navigation of nepotism’s thorny thicket. Born into iconoclasm—her father’s pirate swagger, her mother’s chanson cool—she’s long battled the “nepo-baby” tag, channeling it into roles that defy diminishment: the defiant ingenue in The King (2019), the spectral waif in Voyagers (2021), the bloodied survivor in Silent Night (2021). Wolf (2021), a lycanthropic fable where she played a captive “she-wolf” in a clinical menagerie, now feels prescient—a dry run for Werwulf‘s beastly bonds. Yet Eggers, who handpicked her for Ellen after a chemistry read that crackled like St. Elmo’s fire, sees in her a kindred spirit: “Lily has that rare gift—the ability to be both fragile and ferocious, to let the wild in without losing herself,” he told IndieWire in a rare pre-production dispatch. Their rapport, forged in Nosferatu‘s blood-soaked bridal suite, extends to Werwulf‘s communal hearth scenes, where Depp’s Eadgyth tends to Taylor-Johnson’s afflicted werwulf, her touch a blend of maternal mercy and morbid curiosity. Dafoe’s character, a firebrand priest wielding birch rods and brimstone sermons, positions her as heretic foil, their clashes promising Eggers’ signature verbal duels—archaic barbs laced with blasphemous poetry.

As filming barrels toward a wrap by February 2026, under cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s chiaroscuro mastery (his Nosferatu work earned an Oscar nod for evoking Murnau’s monochrome menace), the anticipation swells like a gathering storm. Focus Features, Eggers’ steadfast patrons since The Witch‘s Sundance sorcery, slots Werwulf for a Christmas Day 2026 bow—a Yuletide gut-punch echoing Nosferatu‘s holiday haunt. Early test screenings, whispered about in guild halls, buzz with the film’s unyielding immersion: no CGI howls, but practical transformations via Rick Baker-level makeup, where Taylor-Johnson’s jaw elongates in agonizing increments, fur sprouting like fungal rot. Sound design, helmed by Eggers’ brother Craig, layers the score with reconstructed lutes and wolfish wind, while Sjón’s lyrics infuse folk ballads with prophetic dread. For Depp, it’s the capstone to a banner year: post-Nosferatu‘s Golden Globe nod, her Werwulf turn could propel her toward awards-circuit apotheosis, proving the “wild” woman of the moors is no fleeting fancy, but a force as enduring as Eggers’ obsessions.

In the end, Lily-Rose Depp’s plunge into Werwulf‘s muck isn’t just a transformation—it’s a transfiguration, a willing exile from glamour’s gilded cage into the beast’s bloody embrace. As Eadgyth, she becomes the film’s feral fulcrum: the one who sees the man in the monster, the madness in the myth, and dares to howl back. Eggers, ever the alchemist, has distilled her essence into something elemental—earth and anguish, bloom and blight. When the credits crawl over those final, fog-veiled frames, audiences may not just shudder; they may see their own wildness reflected, untamed and unrepentant. In medieval England’s merciless mirror, Depp doesn’t play the prey—she becomes the pack. And in Robert Eggers’ shadowed canon, that’s the most terrifying triumph of all.