FRANKENSTEIN's Jacob Elordi Says His 10-Hour Monster Makeup Was “Incredibly Liberating”

Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein is finally coming to life, and Jacob Elordi is opening up about the extreme transformation process that helped him embody one of cinema’s most iconic monsters.

During a recent chat with Deadline at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Elordi revealed that his journey into becoming The Creature involved an intense, nearly half-day ritual in the makeup chair, yet he found the experience freeing rather than frustrating.

“It was 10 hours to kind of relinquish myself and become this thing that’s other, which was a great relief, really.”

He went on to credit Mike Hill, the film’s head of prosthetic makeup effects, for guiding him through the metamorphosis.

Hill is no stranger to bringing monsters to life. The artist has previously collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on The Shape of Water (2017), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), Nightmare Alley (2021), and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023).

But for Frankenstein, Hill faced a particularly daunting challenge, crafting a new look for the Creature without leaning on the countless previous iterations of Mary Shelley’s creation.

“It was very tricky, originally, and very daunting coming up with a new design for Frankenstein’s creature, but we weren’t looking at movies, we were looking at the literary versions of this creature. And on top of that, Guillermo’s version of the literary version.”

Hill went on to emphasize that this interpretation of the Creature needed to feel tangible and human—not overly stylized or digital.

“The Creature’s so grounded. You have to make the Creature real. If you make him too fantastic, then it goes out of the movie.

“So, the fantastic side of him is that we know he’s been patched together from the dead and brought back to life.

“We know he’s stitched up in areas and pieced together; that speaks for itself. So, you don’t need any glitz and glamour or CGI to help that along. It has to stay grounded.”

That sense of realism even influenced smaller design choices, like the Creature’s hair color.

“So much as, the reason we did his hair brown and not black. It’s just so obvious to do a character with jet black hair, so we wanted him a little bit more Earthen, more than you felt that he wasn’t anything alien, he was one of us.”

The director previously explained the Monster is “staggeringly beautiful, in an otherworldly way. It looks like a newborn, alabaster creature,” he explained. “The scars are beautiful and almost aerodynamic.”

Because the Monster is stitched together from multiple corpses, del Toro revealed that its skin is a mix of colors. “The hues are pale but almost translucent. It feels like a newborn soul.”

According to del Toro, the monster design isn’t meant to be frieghtening, he said: “Victor is as much an artist as he is a surgeon, and if he’s been dreaming about this creature for all his life, he’s going to nail it.”

What he “didn’t want was the feeling that you were seeing an accident victim that has been patched [together].” But, that’s kinda what we are seeing in the image.

With Elordi’s haunting physicality, Hill’s grounded creature design, and Del Toro’s signature storytelling, Frankenstein is shaping up to be something special.

The film hits select theaters on October 17 before streaming on Netflix starting November 7.