FRANKENSTEIN’s Jacob Elordi says his 10-hour monster makeup was ‘incredibly liberating’

Guillermo del Torothe long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein is finally coming to life, and Giacobbe 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 to becoming The Creature involved an intense nearly half-day ritual in the makeup chair, but he found the experience liberating rather than frustrating.

“It took 10 hours to abandon myself and become this thing that is different, which was a big relief, really.”

He then credited Mike Hill, the person responsible for the film’s prosthetic makeup effects, with guiding him through the metamorphosis.

Hill is no stranger to bringing monsters to life. The artist has already collaborated with Guillermo del Toro The shape of water (2017), Scary stories to tell in the dark (2019), Alley of nightmares (2021) e The last voyage of the Demeter (2023).

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

“At first it was very complicated and daunting to come up with a new design for Frankenstein’s creature, but we weren’t looking at the films, we were looking at the literary versions of this creature. And what’s more, Guillermo’s version of the literary version.”

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

“The Creature is so grounded. You have to make it real. If you make it too fantastical, then it goes out of the movie.

“So what’s great about him is that we know he’s been brought back together from death and brought back to life.

“We know it’s stitched in some areas and put together; that speaks for itself. So, you don’t need glitz, glamor or CGI to help it. It has to stay grounded.”

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

“Also why we made his hair brown and not black. It’s just obvious to make a character with jet black hair, so we wanted him to be a little more earthly, more than just like he wasn’t anything alien, he was one of us.”

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

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

According to del Toro, the monster’s design is not meant to be scary, he said: “Victor is as much an artist as he is a surgeon, and if he’s dreamed of this creature his whole life, he’ll make it.”

What he “didn’t want was the feeling of seeing an accident victim who had a patch applied [together].” But that’s more or less what we see in the image.

With Elordi’s uncanny physicality, Hill’s down-to-earth creature designs, and del Toro’s signature storytelling, Frankenstein is shaping up to be something special.

The film will be released in select theaters on October 17 before streaming on Netflix starting November 7.