Lars Eidinger has still gotten over the fact that he didn’t get to play a vampire in “The Blood Countess,” starring Isabelle Huppert and directed by celebrated German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger.
During the press conference for the movie at the Berlin Film Festival hours before its world premiere, Eidinger revealed that when Ottinger came to him with the role, he assumed he would play a vampire. But the director had other plans.
“She asked me if I wanted to be in her next movie — a vampire movie — and I thought, yeah, that’s great. I expected to be a vampire. Then they sent me the script and it turned out that I’m the therapist of the vampire!” he joked.
“The Blood Countess,” which also stars Birgit Minichmayr, Thomas Schubert and André Jung, takes the story of infamous Hungarian serial killer Elizabeth Báthory to modern-day Vienna. “She reunites with her devoted underling, Hermine, to track down a dangerous book with the power to destroy all evil — including all vampires such as themselves,” the film’s synopsis reads.
“It doesn’t happen to me often, but I always wanted to be the vampire and not the therapist — and especially the part that Thomas is playing is so wonderful, the vegetarian vampire,” Eidinger continued. “I wanted to be the vegetarian vampire! Maybe that gives the character [of the therapist] something philosophical, that he wants to be somebody else. I don’t know.”
The Berlin Film Festival runs through Feb. 22.