Behold the Creature: Introducing Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s Monster

The naked dead man lies face down just inside the doorway. Livers, hearts, stomachs and other vital organs are stacked on shelves further down the corridor. Severed limbs are heaped on the concrete floor. The grim props are breadcrumbs leading to the interior of a vast soundstage, where a bearded man sits smiling behind a bank of monitors. Amid the death and decay, Guillermo del Toro is making the movie of a lifetime. He has yearned to put his own stamp on Frankenstein for as long as he has been making films, but there was a moment when he feared time would run out first.

“I’ve been doing movies for 30 years. I’m not going to be alive for 30 [more] years, I don’t think,” says del Toro, who’s now 60. Frankenstein is his bucket list film, a passion project that struggled to find a patron. “Everybody said no,” del Toro says, shaking his head. It’s a pattern that has persisted throughout his career: generate an epic, offbeat idea that’s resoundingly rejected by Hollywood. Then wait a few years. Finally, a risk-taking executive will say yes—and a modern classic will be born.

The results speak for themselves. 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, a macabre fairy tale that sprang from 20 years of sketches and notes, earned del Toro his first Oscar nominations. Del Toro won both best director and best picture for 2017’s The Shape of Water, his shocking and romantic take on Creature From the Black Lagoon. More recently, he collected best animated feature for 2022’s bittersweet stop-motion Pinocchio. In each case, del Toro refused to bend; he would rather not have made these films than make them with compromises. Finally, Netflix green-lit his operatic spin on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. The finished movie will debut on the streaming service in November.

On the morning Vanity Fair visited its Toronto set, Frankenstein was literally coming to life. Del Toro was directing Oscar Isaac in the montage sequence where his obsessed scientist pieces together the body of his monster. Dr. Viktor Frankenstein’s laboratory resides within the ornate cistern of an 18th century water tower in the Carpathian mountain range; the 360-degree set built by production designer Tamara Deverell combines science fiction with ancient mythology.

Four immense columns of green corrugated glass reach upward toward the chamber’s stone arches, glowing hellfire red when fully charged by the elegantly sculpted silverworks that are meant to draw electricity from storm clouds above. Against the back wall, a stone sculpture of Medusa that once flooded this tower with water now gazes down in blank-eyed horror at the abominations the not-so-good doctor is perpetrating. “I am an archeologist that creates his own ruins,” del Toro says.

As Isaac gets to work making the body that del Toro describes as “a quilt,” the director urges him not to be delicate. “Bone surgery is a lot like carpentry,” del Toro explains. “They call it traumatology, because it causes such trauma. Somebody coming in with a box of tools.”

Isaac, clad in red gloves and a billowing stained shirt open to the navel, likes that. He smiles behind sweaty hair that dangles down over his face. “I think instead of calling myself an actor, I’m going to introduce myself as a traumatologist,” he says.

Isaac plays the ethically challenged scientist as part surgeon, part mechanic. “Grab the screwdriver,” del Toro tells the actor as Dr. Frankenstein fastens a lower leg onto a knee joint. “You can pretend that there’s a screw.”

This leads to an urgent question from on-set medical advisor Dr. Peter Kopplin. “When was the screwdriver invented?” he asks the director and crew. “Is that an anachronism?” This part of Frankenstein takes place in the early 1850s, and the retired physician’s quick research absolves the moment of any crimes against history. “No, it isn’t,” Kopplin explains. “Apparently it’s in a work book from the 15th century.”

Jacob Elordi plays the reanimated creature, whose look remains under wraps (literally) in this exclusive preview. When fully exposed, the creature resembles a marble statue from antiquity that has been shattered and fused back together. Isaac’s gruesome assembly sequence results in rare time off for the Euphoria and Saltburn heartthrob. “I think that’s the one day I didn’t shoot,” Elordi says later.

Instead, Isaac’s costars are the morbid look-alike props that surround the set. Each has an identity of its own. “This is Yorick,” del Toro says, pointing out a peeled skull with a beard, named after Hamlet’s deceased jester. A flayed cadaver that Isaac sets to work on in another shot is nicknamed “Canadian Bacon.”

“Pull the skin and fold it over like a calzone,” del Toro instructs the actor, before gesturing to a plate with severed hands: “Finger foods?”

The gallows humor never stops, even though there’s a ticking clock: each prop cadaver sits on an immense block of real ice, which is gradually melting. “There’s a shot coming up where we shoot through the ice,” del Toro says.

The incessant laughter between him and Isaac lightens the mood on a gloomy story story about the hubris of trying to defy death rather than savoring the fleeting time we are given. “What’s interesting to me is that he’s not trying to keep me in some sort of dark evil zone. He basically directs in jokes to me,” Isaac says.

Del Toro, who’s from Mexico, often delivers these bleak gags in Spanish to Isaac, who was born in Guatemala. “It feels like I’m making something with a family member,” Isaac says. Speaking Spanish also kept them out of trouble. “A lot of the jokes aren’t translatable because they sound kind of awful when you’re telling them in English,” the actor admits.

Though the movie itself does not have a lighthearted tone, del Toro’s operatic approach gives it an over-the-top feeling that softens the blows. “There’s absurdity in the face of darkness, which is a very, very elemental trait of Latin America,” Isaac says. “There’s a nuance about how one approaches death and darkness that has a surreality to it.”

Del Toro’s Frankenstein delves into an aspect sometimes overlooked by readers of Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic. Her book, subtitled The Modern Prometheus, is often seen as a warning about heedless science. But del Toro uses Shelley’s tale of grim resurrection to dramatize toxic family dynamics. “It’s parents and children,” Elordi says. “Fathers and sons, particularly.”

It’s a theme that del Toro has visited before. “These are the parallels between Pinocchio and Frankenstein,” the filmmaker says. “It’s the idea of a person going from a baby to a human being in a short span of time and being exposed to everything—cold, warmth, violence, love, loss. And then going to his creator to say, ‘Why? Why did you put me here? Why didn’t you give me the answers? What do I have to learn in my suffering?’”

In the decades he has been refining his script, the writer-director also drew upon his Roman Catholic background. It’s no accident that the table on which the monster is born rises up with his arms spread, as though on a crucifix. Del Toro also drew connections between his monster and the Book of Job, in which God tests a man’s faith by heaping misery upon him. “Job is saying to God, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ And God is answering very, very biblically: ‘Who the fuck are you to ask me a question?’” del Toro says with a laugh.

Isaac’s Dr. Frankenstein is just as impatient with his creation’s neediness, and replicates the merciless treatment he learned as a child from his own imperious father (played by Charles Dance). “The movie is trying to articulate that the father becomes his father to his son without realizing it,” del Toro says. In turn, the monster revolts against his creator in a clash that rips through the Frankenstein family, creates bloodshed and destruction, and leads both men—the scientist and his creation—into the dead end of a frozen wasteland.

In addition to drawing from folktales and the Bible, del Toro also pulled from his own life, as the father of two grown daughters. “There are certain movies I could not have made if I hadn’t become a father. When people say, ‘How do you react to bad reviews?’ I go, you get them in life with your teenage kids. ‘That’s two thumbs down,’” he says. “I’ve tried my best. You always have your blind spots. But I think I can talk to my kids and have really, really deep conversations. They bring their troubles to me. The greatest tribute you can expect as a dad is for them to come to you and say, ‘I have this problem. I need you.’”

But Dr. Frankenstein and his creature are not exactly the heart-to-heart types. And the scientist’s relationship with his own father is far more chaotic and destructive than anything Shelley imagined. “In the Mary Shelley book, funnily enough, Victor had the sweetest stage-mom of a dad,” Isaac points out. “He followed him around, paid for everything, was such a big part of his life, writing him letters all the time, believing in him. And he still ended up being what he was.”

Another father figure looming over this Frankenstein is the specter of Boris Karloff. Elordi’s creature looks nothing like the square-topped, bolt-necked monster of director James Whale’s indelible Universal films from the 1930s, but del Toro is more than just a devout fan of those movies. He’s a scholar, collector and curator, and his Los Angeles home, which he has given the Dickensian nickname “Bleak House,” is practically a museum dedicated to those Gothic classics.

During filming in the laboratory, a large sticker featuring Karloff’s monster stares down at del Toro from the wall of the director’s array of video screens. Although his Frankenstein will look very different, the director wanted a constant reminder of the late actor who first sparked (so to speak) his interest in the story.

“I devoured all of his monsters,” Elordi says of Karloff. “At first I thought, I’ll stay away from this. I want to do my own thing.’ And then I asked Guillermo, ‘Should I watch the other Frankensteins?’ And he goes, ‘What the fuck do you mean?’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want it to be influenced.’ He says, ‘My friend, it’s a movie, it can’t fucking hurt you.’ I went home, and I just binged them.”

Elordi says he hoped something rubbed off. “Something in his gaze, something in the way that he moves…. The biggest thing was just immersing myself in the world of these creatures.”

While the story centers mainly on the doctor and his creation, the havoc of their relationship spreads beyond Frankenstein’s dueling leads. Mia Goth costars as Elizabeth, the fiancée of Victor’s kind-hearted younger brother, who becomes a fixation for both Isaac and Elordi’s characters.

“Elizabeth has quite an ethereal quality,” says costume designer Kate Hawley, who worked with del Toro previously on Crimson Peak. “We looked at the ’60s horror films because Guillermo wanted her colors to be saturated. Red and green were a big thing, because there’s a lot of stuff in the film about blood, and also the fear of it.”

Christoph Waltz plays a character who’s responsible for spilling much of it. His Harlander is an arms merchant who has made a fortune selling weapons to warring militaries. At the time of this Frankenstein’s telling, the Crimean War is raging. Harlander, seeking a miracle gateway to immortality, keeps Dr. Frankenstein’s research going by providing him with cash. Meanwhile, the war provides him with no end of robust young bodies.

Finally, there’s Shelley’s old blind man, played by Game of Thrones bridge tyrant David Bradley (also the voice of Geppetto in del Toro’s Pinnochio), who is once again in kindly old-timer mode here. He and Elizabeth may be the only two characters who give Elordi’s monster a modicum of kindness. “There is a moment where the blind man says, ‘To know who has harmed you, why they have harmed you, and decide to let it go—that is wisdom,’” del Toro says.

Mike Hill, the makeup artist who previously worked with the filmmaker on The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley, may not be onscreen, but his fingerprints are all over Elordi’s kintsugi-like monster. Just before filming commenced, the shoot was tossed into disarray when Andrew Garfield, originally cast as the monster, dropped out of the movie, citing scheduling conflicts with other films that arose after the 2023 Hollywood strikes.

Once again, del Toro feared his Frankenstein hopes would fall apart, just weeks away from the start of production. Fortunately, Elordi was quickly recruited, and his six-foot-five frame alone gave him a literal leg up on the five-foot-ten Garfield. “Andrew Garfield stepping out and Jacob coming in. I mean, it was like Jacob is the most perfect actor for the creature,” del Toro says. “And we have a supernaturally good connection. It’s like, very few words. Very few things I have to say, and he does it.”

Still, he and Hill had to scramble to adjust their monster materials. The first time around, they took nine months to refine the creature’s look. “We recast, and we had nine weeks,” del Toro says. “You can’t be under more pressure than that.”

On a Saturday off from shooting, Hill meets del Toro in his Toronto apartment to partake in one of the director’s favorite pastimes: miniature model painting. While del Toro adds lacquer to a plastic version of the big-brained alien from 1955’s This Island Earth, Hill sips coffee and describes Elordi as a miracle that saved the movie.

“The thing about Jacob is, he just has everything rolled into one,” the makeup artist says. “I remember an interview with Richard Donner. He said, ‘I eventually had to pray to God to bring me Superman with Christopher Reeve.’” When del Toro suggested casting the towering Euphoria star, his own prayers were answered.

“What attracted me to him was his gangliness and his wrists. It was this looseness,” Hill says. “Then he has these real somber moments where he watches you really deftly, and his eyelids are low, with the long lashes like Karloff. I was like, ‘I don’t know who else you could get with a physicality like this.’ His demeanor is innocent, but it’s encompassed in a six-foot-five frame. He could really do a lot of damage if this man really wanted to be a bad guy.”

Elordi’s body became the life-size model that Hill painted. The actor says those hours in the chair each day became a chance to meditate on Frankenstein’s simpleminded creature, who is grasping for an explanation about why he’s alive. “Because I came in so late, everything happened on top of each other at the same time,” Elordi says. “I was shooting as I was seeing, as I was understanding.”

The last contributor to Elordi’s character did so from beyond the grave. Bernie Wrightson, the acclaimed illustrator of monsters and magic, died of cancer in 2017. He was a friend of del Toro’s, and his illustrated 1983 version of Shelley’s Frankenstein was just as important an ingredient in this film as her novel and the Bible of del Toro’s churchgoing days.

Before embarking on this movie, del Toro licensed Wrightson’s illustrations of the monster. Isaac had printouts of the late artist’s work lining his trailer for inspiration when he was off set. Elordi did the same at his apartment. “I turned it into this shrine to all things that I felt pertained to the creature,” Elordi says. “Bernie’s pictures were all over the walls. Maybe when you’re asleep, or just by walking around it all, you end up soaking it in.”

Wrightson’s monster doesn’t look anything like Hill’s version of the creature, but del Toro says some of the poses and shots match. “We’re quoting it very little. There are three specific poses that remind you of him, but it has the spirit he created.”

Again, del Toro talks about these other artists in religious terms. “We are just doing a beautiful mass. The church is not built by us, but we are delivering a great, passionate soul-searing sermon in that church,” he says. “Karloff looms eternal. Bernie looms eternal. But we are not doing Karloff and we’re not doing Bernie, and we’re not doing Mary. But I’ll say this: Mary Shelley and Bernie Wrightson and Karloff are as important to me as my father and mother. They gave birth to who I am, period.”

All children ultimately have to shrug off their parents and find their own way.