Jacob Elordi is set to play Frankenstein’s monster in Guillermo Del Toro’s re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s novel. According to Del Toro, Elordi’s version of the man-made monster isn’t repulsive but “staggeringly beautiful, in an otherworldly way.”
The director explained that he didn’t want the audience to feel as if they were seeing “an accident victim that has been patched [together],” adding that the experiment is Frankenstein’s most valued work. Del Toro told Entertainment Weekly, “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.”
He continued, “It looks like a newborn, alabaster creature. The scars are beautiful and almost aerodynamic.” Since the doctor created the creature using skins “from different bodies,” the director noted that parts of his skin have “different colors.” “The hues are pale but almost translucent. It feels like a newborn soul.”
At the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Del Toro revealed he grew up with Shelley’s novel. “It was a religion for me. Since I was a kid—I was raised very Catholic—I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like,” he shared. “So I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” Del Toro added.
