The Northman

Unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising trailer reactions from team EMPIRE

Ben Travis (Deputy Online Editor): This is a big step up for Robert Eggers. The scale of it looks so much bigger than The Witch and The Lighthouse. The studio’s trying to sell it as a mainstream film, but that’s not his sensibility. He’s going to make it feel gritty and grounded but also mythical, like with everything else that he’s done.

James Dyer (Digital Editor-in-chief ): I’m very here for Eric Northman from

True Blood playing a Northman.

Ben: Maybe it’s gonna go full From Dusk Till Dawn halfway through; it becomes the vampire movie that you weren’t expecting.

Beth Webb (News Editor): Nicole Kidman’s wig has garnered its own fanbase on the internet, which is pretty nice.

James: She looks very Galadriel here.

Ben: Did she wander straight off the set of Nine Perfect Strangers and just rejig the wig and slightly change her accent?

Sophie Butcher (Social Media Editor): Didn’t she play Alexander Skarsgård’s wife in Big Little Lies, and now she’s playing his mother? And he says, “Avenge my father, save my mother,” in the trailer. So is Nicole Kidman still playing her later in the film?

Joanna Moran (Photography Director): If this is indeed loosely based on Hamlet, she marries hot stuff Claes Bang, who plays his uncle.

James: He brings the clash bang, she brings the wallop.

John Nugent (Reviews Editor): Ethan Hawke looking amazing here.

Beth: Straight-up stunner.

Ben: He’s getting absolutely Boromir-d here: he gets shot by a massive arrow but keeps swinging his sword anyway.

John: I think they give quite a lot of the plot away in this trailer, which is a shame.

Chris Lupton (Creative Director): I’m of the mind that this isn’t what we think it is. I think there’s more to it than just a bunch of Vikings killing each other.

John: It’s gonna be freaky as fuck.

James: I like that it’s co-written by someone called Sjón, who I think is an Icelandic poet.

Joanna: His full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, but he shortened it to Sjón.

Alex Godfrey (Features Editor): Just one name, like Madonna.

Chris: This would 100 per cent be a better movie if Madonna was in it.

James: It’s evens and odds whether or not Björk’s actually in costume or just her Sunday clothes.

John: I’ve seen Björk live and she wears this sort of stuff all the time.

Joanna: It’s just her Met Gala outfit.

John: It would be more shocking if she was wearing a demure pantsuit.

Ben: I wonder what the cool animal character in this film is going to be. There was Black Phillip the goat in The Witch and the seagulls in The Lighthouse…

Joanna: I was just looking on IMDB and thought it said there was a beaver in the film, but it actually says “standard bearer”.

Alex: I can’t wait to see this film. Every shot excites me.

James: I could rock that hat.

Alex: I don’t think that you could.

James: I think it would fit my aesthetic quite well.

Joanna: Chris has just come back to the Trailer Talk video chat wearing a furry wolf hat.

Chris: It’s made of the beards of past boyfriends.

James: That’s Big Dick Energy right there.

Alex: That’s some mad Fatima Whitbread javelin shit.

Ben: It’s like the shot in Hawkeye where Jeremy Renner catches the Molotov cocktail and chucks it back. Every action film has to include somebody catching a weapon that was thrown at them and immediately chucking it back because it’s fucking sick.

John: Can we acknowledge Skarsgård’s abs while we’re here? He seems to have a ten-pack.

Alex: Can it just be noted that Beth put her specs on in order to examine the ten-pack?

John: That’s like an Austin Powers move.

Beth: It’s a very dark screen and I just want to be accurate. I take my job very seriously.

Mike Cathro (Deputy Art Director): This looks like one of those Loki variants to me.

Sophie: This has a real abstract surrealness to it. I think this is a glimpse of when it gets really trippy.

Joanna: It looks like a perfume ad.

Ben: I think there will be scenes in this film that are really out-there, where the level of reality is up to the viewer. This feels like a signature move of Eggers at this point, if you think about The Lighthouse with the mermaid dreams, and The Witch had a real level of ambiguity to the supernatural stuff that it had going on.

Alex: I hope this does really well, it looks fucking amazing. I can’t think of a film that I’m looking forward to more this year.