Jacob Elordi Had “Complete Liberty” to Shape the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN
Saltburn and Euphoria star Jacob Elordi is stepping into some monstrous shoes with Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s ambitious new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic for Netflix.
Elordi is physically embodying the pain, confusion, and wonder of the Creature himself, a being literally pieced together from death and reanimated by a man obsessed with playing God.
Elordi reveals that del Toro gave him extraordinary creative freedom in bringing this iconic monster to life. “I had complete liberty to create [the Creature] the way that I saw it,” Elordi told GamesRadar+.
“The first time I read the screenplay, I got all these images in my head, and then it was just the practical process of applying.”
The actor didn’t rely solely on makeup or effects to build the role. Instead, he focused deeply on movement and physical expression, pulling inspiration from a unique art form.
“I studied butoh, which is this Japanese dance,” he explained. “It was a lot of walking around in strange ways and watching myself in the mirror, and I'd go like this, and then I'd ask someone, 'Does this look good?' And they'd be like, 'Definitely don't do that.' Or, like, 'Too much.'
“But just a lot of trial and error. And then also just responding to the logic of the screenplay and what that suffering is like, you know, considering all the different body parts.”
That same hands-on process extended to the Creature’s unsettling voice. “The process of settling on the Creature's unusual accent was very, very similar, actually,” Elordi said.
“When I think about the scene where [Isaac] constructs him, that actually has a lot to do with the movement and the voice, because you can see [him] move a trachea or something. What does that do, you know?”
In Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant but tormented scientist who creates the Creature, while Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, and Charles Dance round out the stellar cast.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein delivers a blend gothic horror, tragedy, and humanity in a way only the Oscar-winning filmmaker can deliver. For Elordi, the experience of bringing the creature to life was an intense physical and emotional transformation that reimagines one of literature’s most misunderstood monsters.
Frankenstein is now in limited theaters and it it premieres on Netflix on November 7.