Willem Dafoe’s Werwulf Role Revealed as Robert Eggers Marks a Unique Origin for His Beast

Robert Eggers just revealed Willem Dafoe‘s role in Werwulf and explained why this film throws out every rule audiences know. The director also talked about Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s feral transformation, and it’s unlike anything he’s done before.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Werwulf to get a new origin

Esquire published the first official image from Robert Eggers’ Werwulf on June 25, courtesy of Focus Features. Aaron Taylor-Johnson appears as a cursed farmer living in 13th-century England in the still. The film takes place around 1300, when wolves still roamed the English countryside.

Eggers told Esquire he deliberately reset the werewolf genre by going back to its medieval roots. “All the clichés of being bitten by a werewolf and silver bullets and a lot of the stuff that has become almost campy doesn’t exist in the mythology of this movie,” he said.

Audiences would not need to be familiar with Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man or An American Werewolf in London. The film builds its own mythology from the ground up instead.

Taylor-Johnson plays a farmer battling a curse he cannot escape. “It’s a story about a man who is cursed and is trying to find salvation through love,” Eggers said. “He’s a character who is haunted and in great pain.” No character carries a name in the film except for a dog.

The actor underwent months of physical training for the transformation sequences. He also studied the movements of a real wolf during pre-production. Eggers called the resulting performance “incredibly harrowing” and wove those observations directly into the film.

Eggers reveals Willem Dafoe’s role in Werwulf

Willem Dafoe plays a hunter in the story, Eggers confirmed. “It’ll be clear from the trailer that Willem is a hunter,” he noted. This marks yet another collaboration between the two after multiple films together.

Lily-Rose Depp returns from Nosferatu to portray the farmer’s wife and mother to several children. Eggers described her as “the heart of the movie” and praised her physical commitment. “She inhabits a very different person that’s very different from her and very different from any character she’s ever played,” he said.

Ralph Ineson and Bodhi Rae Breathnach also join the cast. Two Oxford professors helped develop the film’s Middle English dialogue alongside a dialect coach. Eggers has previously called the screenplay “the darkest thing I have ever written. By far” (via The Hollywood News).

Werwulf arrives in theaters on Christmas Day 2026.

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