Lars Eidinger Wanted Isabelle Huppert’s Vampire Role in ‘The Blood Countess’: But ‘It Turned Out I Was the Vampire’s Therapist!’

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.”

Huppert, who was sporting black shades and a striking white outfit, said being part of “The Blood Countess” and collaborating with Ottinger was a “kind of adventure.” “It’s this amazing encounter between mythological stories such as ‘The Blood Countess’ and someone’s universe that is immense, imaginary, poetic, funny,” she said, referring to Ottinger, whose body of work includes “Madame X — An Absolute Ruler,” “Ticket of No Return” and “Freak Orlando.”

“It’s a whole journey,” she said, before adding, “The main reason and source of immense pleasure — to do this thing, to be with everybody here in this room and at this table, and with Ulrike, because Ulrike is a very special person, a woman director — maybe she’s even more than a director. She’s a visionary, and this is what cinema requires, and this is what you can get from cinema on the best occasions,” Huppert continued.

Ottinger, who received an Honorary Golden Bear in 2020, told Variety in an interview before the start of the festival that she wrote the screenplay in 1998 and begun discussing the project with Huppert roughly two decades ago. The film was eventually mounted on an €8 million budget and shot in Vienna in just 30 days. 

During the press conference, Ottinger was also asked about the countess’ fluid sexuality, and possibly queer identity. Vampires have the desire after blood.

The director said, “Vampires have the desire after blood. Sometimes it comes from men. Sometimes it comes from women in between.”

Huppert embraced the blood-sucking role wholeheartedly, Ottinger said. “Isabelle told me, ‘You don’t think I should I should bite more in this film,’ and I said, ‘If you wish! We can start right away from the beginning!”

The Berlin Film Festival runs through Feb. 22.