Jacob Elordi makes quite the transformation into The Creature for Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein — but he only took the job so far.
At the film‘s Los Angeles premiere on Monday, the star told The Hollywood Reporter that while shooting the project, “There’s a certain point once the prosthetics go on where they kind of demand that you are The Creature and there’s a level of focus that needs to come to the role. But at the same time Guillermo created such a free set — I hate when people say this but he really created a safe space, so it was creatively very liberating to be on that set. It wasn’t like this idea everyone has of being Method, which is tortured and suffering and everyone else suffers so you can get a performance. It was a little different to that.”
Oscar Isaac, who plays his creator, Victor Frankenstein, echoed that del Toro set the tone on set and “it felt much more like a team, so there wasn’t a lot of us wallowing in our own shit. It was us really coming together and being there for each other.”
This film is a long time coming for del Toro, who has wanted to make a Frankenstein adaptation for decades and had repeatedly stated that it’s his dream project.
Now that he’s completed it, the filmmaker joked that “it’s postpartum depression and celebration at the same time. And it’s because when the horizon shifts that brutally — like if you dreamed to make the team or dreamed about graduating or whatever and then you do it and you go, ‘ah!,’ like the elevator dropped — so that’s the one thing; the other one is the joy of having achieved, with a great team, a very operatic, beautiful, epic intimate story about fathers and sons and fathers and sons transmitting the pain. And the power of forgiveness and acceptance is not an easy task.”
Del Toro also explained why he chose to feature both Victor’s and The Creature’s points of view in the story, as the film is split in half to show both of their perspectives. “That’s what we’re not doing in anything right now,” he said. “We are showing one perspective or another, and complexity comes from the thought that there is the other, and the other is you. If you can identify that there’s no you and me but us, it’s an urgent tale to tell.”
Frankenstein, which also stars Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer and Christoph Waltz, hits select theaters Oct. 17 and starts streaming on Netflix Nov. 7.
Tiffany Taylor contributed to this report.
