Jacob Elordi is unrecognizable in “Frankenstein.” He’s not the high school jock who struts the halls of “Euphoria” High, the college boy worth killing for in “Saltburn,” the taller-than-life rock star from “Priscilla.” In Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of the classic horror novel, Elordi is a creature locked in a deadly feud with his maker, Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac).
To get into character, Elordi spent up to 10 hours in the makeup chair before shooting on the film’s sprawling sets in Toronto and Scotland. “There’s so many different layers to the costume,” Elordi says of playing the enigmatic monster with translucent skin. “When he’s born, he’s wearing nearly nothing. His chest is open and his head is high. Then, as he starts to experience pain, as we do as a teenager, he starts to hunch his shoulders. And as an adult, he closes off.”
Yet there was one critic who didn’t buy his performance. Elordi, 28, is visiting New York for a Variety cover shoot accompanied by his own creature — an incredibly mellow golden retriever, Layla. As Elordi rests his head on Isaac’s shoulder to re-create their complicated on-screen bond, Layla receives belly rubs from members of our crew. In fact, Layla’s so Zen that she didn’t even freak out when Elordi donned layers of prosthetics to look like the monster familiar from countless on-screen depictions. “She loved it, actually,” Elordi insists. “She didn’t bark — or feel threatened.”
She’s going to be the only one. Elordi and Isaac are at the center of one of this year’s biggest bets: A spellbinding 149-minute epic that, for months, has been tapped as a major awards contender for Netflix. (Spoiler warning: It’s worth the wait.) Frankenstein is as blue-chip a Hollywood brand as they come, from the 1910 silent film that brought him to the screen for the first time to the forthcoming “The Bride!” (Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reimagining of the monster’s girlfriend) and “Frankenstein in Romania” (Sebastian Stan’s next big acting swing after “The Apprentice”). But the level of investment and scale del Toro demanded for the $120 million picture meant that it took three decades and several false starts to bring this beast to life. “I pitched it everywhere,” del Toro says, sighing. “It’s been my sort of Mount Everest to climb.”
Platon for Variety
Del Toro’s long journey to “Frankenstein” will come alive on Aug. 30 at the Venice Film Festival. There, audiences will first see Isaac’s tour-de-force turn as Victor. He plays the monster’s daddy as a bohemian mix of rock stars, starting with David Bowie; his hair is in a pompadour, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat and long velvet coat. Victor’s laboratory, which in del Toro’s film is housed in an abandoned water tower outfitted with gargantuan glass columns that change in color from emerald green to ruby red as electricity pulses through them, is the stadium stage that allows the inventor to peacock as he creates a new life-form.
“I saw him much more as an artist than as a scientist,” Isaac says. “I watched a video of Prince going to the [2007] Super Bowl in order to rehearse. And I just basically stole his walk when he’s going up to the stage with his hands behind the back.” In keeping with the rock star theme, del Toro’s direction consisted of telling Isaac: “Give me more Mick Jagger.”
Hanging out in Manhattan on a Sunday in August, Isaac and Elordi flicker with excitement at finally being able to talk about a project that’s consumed so much of their professional lives. Both men are charismatic movie stars who happen to share a secret film-geek disposition. Elordi has flown in from Los Angeles, where he’s shooting the third season of “Euphoria,” which involves a time jump for his character, Nate, into adulthood. Indeed, at 6-foot-5 but hiding it under a gangly posture, the Australian star can seem younger than his 28 years. He sits cross-legged on a couch, wearing Bottega Veneta loafers (with black petals on them), as he sniffles from a cold. A touch awkward, he’s fit to play a creature who doesn’t fit into this world.
The 46-year-old Isaac, born in Guatemala and raised in Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami, draws him out, and the two play off each other like siblings at a family dinner.
“You’re one of my favorite actors in the world,” Elordi tells Isaac, who blushes. Elordi, as a teenager in Brisbane, first discovered his co-star in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the 2013 film directed by the Coen brothers. “I was shitting bricks at the prospect of working with a hero.”
Isaac was always del Toro’s first choice for Victor, even before there was a screenplay. The two met over a long lunch as del Toro teased out details. “When I talked to Guillermo, he was like, ‘I’m making a feast,’” Isaac says. “And he really did.” A year later, del Toro had Isaac come to a hotel room, where he presented the actor with 30 pages from the script, and Isaac performed every part out loud. “I’m just reading all the voices,” Isaac recalls. By the time he got to the last page, “we were just crying,” Isaac says. “There’s just so much pain there.”
But Elordi was a last-minute addition. When Andrew Garfield dropped out of the project before shooting was set to begin in March 2024, citing scheduling conflicts, del Toro had nine weeks to find a new leading man. He set up a Zoom with Elordi, having been impressed by his performance as a pampered aristocrat in “Saltburn.” The prospect of a meeting left Elordi, a huge fan of del Toro’s, overanalyzing everything.
“I have this thing which I’m trying to shake, but every time I have to talk to a director I’m up all night,” Elordi says, his voice quickening as he reenacts his nervousness. “You set your iPhone up and you’re like, ‘You have to chill.’ But then you think, ‘Should I just be in a white T-shirt or should I be more dressed up? It’s Guillermo del Toro, so I need to look like I’m educated, but also excited. Should I be in a fedora or have a crucifix?’”
He didn’t need to worry, or accessorize. Elordi and del Toro were aligned in their interpretation of the creature, seeing him as an innocent figure captivated by the world around him until the people he meets torture, abuse and shun him, leaving him jaded and vengeful. Del Toro mapped out the emotional journey, from trusting fawn to rageful beast, for Elordi to chart. “Jacob’s eyes are so full of humanity,” del Toro says. “I cast him because of his eyes.”
Platon for Variety
“I was like, ‘OK, I’ll talk to you soon,’” Elordi recalls. As he waited to hear back from the director, “it was the most excruciating nine days of my life.” But Isaac knew Elordi had gotten the role. “Guillermo called me after,” Isaac recalls, “like, ‘I found him! The creature could be Jesus. But with Jacob, it’s Adam. He’s the first human, and it has that innocence.’”
Playing Frankenstein’s creation was the most demanding role of Elordi’s career. To make his early call time, sometimes he’d arrive to the makeup trailer at 10 p.m., staying up all night as he underwent the arduous transformation into a hulking, alabaster thing whose body is a fusion of limbs and organs from different corpses.
“You throw time away when you make a film like this,” Elordi says. “I stopped having a clock, and I would just wait till the SUV arrived. That meant it was time to go. I didn’t do breakfast, lunch or dinner, or think in terms of morning, afternoon, night. It was just one time.”
When he did have a spare moment, Elordi practiced the creature’s unsteady walk and gestures in front of the mirror in his hotel room. The halting, spastic movements he developed were drawn from butoh, a Japanese form of dance noted for its slow, almost disembodied style. To create the character’s gargling and otherworldly speaking voice, Elordi listened to Mongolian throat singing. “It’s guttural smooth chanting,” he explains. And he practiced saying his lines with the false teeth he wears for the movie, to get a sense of how they changed his pronunciation. “It feels like it got hit in the head with a bat,” he says, describing the creature’s grunts early in the film.
Del Toro warned Elordi about what would be expected of him if he took on the role. “This is the sacrament,” he told him during one of their initial conversations. “You need to get into a holy state.” Del Toro’s passion encouraged Elordi to push himself to the breaking point. And the dramatic settings del Toro creates in meticulous detail, from a dreary dungeon to an opulent estate to a schooner stuck in the frozen arctic, made shooting “Frankenstein” a singular experience. “Guillermo would say, ‘This is “The Last of the Fucking Mohicans,”’” Elordi remembers. “He was like, you won’t see another set like this again.”
Netflix will give “Frankenstein” an exclusive three-week theatrical release starting on October 17, before debuting it on its service on November 7. The film is certain to generate buzz among this year’s Oscar contenders, and one of the talking points will inevitably center on Netflix producing a project that demands to be seen on the big screen.
Even the stars of “Frankenstein” want audiences to see it in movie theaters. “It’s heartbreaking that films like these don’t have full cinematic releases,” Elordi says. “My great hope is that we get this film in cinemas for as long as possible. And then, hopefully, that can set a precedent for more films out there.”
Elordi lists one of his favorite moments from the film — the birth of the creature as the camera pulls back in a sweeping shot, and he imagines theatergoers responding to it. “I want a couple of teenagers kissing in the back to see that and have those memories,” Elordi says. “You may not have that experience if you’re just at home on your iPad.”
Isaac jumps in to stress audiences will have the option to see the film as del Toro intended. “It is gonna go to the theater for a while,” he says. “I think people will get to see it on the big screen as much as they can. It is such a marvel.” He thinks about it some more. “It’d be nice to have a communal experience,” Isaac says. “So yeah, seeing it in a theater would be ideal.”
Nearly 20 years ago, del Toro’s “Frankenstein” was set up at Universal, the home to all the seminal 1930s monster movies, until the studio got cold feet. Even after del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” became an international hit, winning three Oscars, executives were deterred by the gargantuan budget and the idiosyncratic take on “Frankenstein,” which reimagines the story as a layered family drama instead of a standard horror film.
Platon for Variety
Years passed, with “Frankenstein” lying eerily quiet; in 2018, del Toro returned to the Oscars with the best picture sweep for “The Shape of Water.” When the director signed a first-look deal at Netflix in 2020, the company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, asked him about his bucket-list projects. They included “Pinocchio” — the classic story of a wooden boy that del Toro made into a 2022 stop-motion animated film set in fascist Italy — and “Frankenstein,” which Netflix greenlit for a hefty price.
If there was ever a project to justify a $120 million budget, it’s this one — a story ambitious enough to imagine what lies between life and death. Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus,” depicted a scientist who experiences the tragic consequences of playing God. Over the ensuing two centuries and change, the book has been adapted as an iconic monster movie (1931’s “Frankenstein”), played for laughs (1974’s “Young Frankenstein”) and reimagined as a steamy bodice ripper (1994’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”). At the heart of most of these films is a warning about the dangers of disruptive technology.
Del Toro’s film, which reconfigures the essential elements of Shelley’s story into something wholly original, is primarily interested in the psychological damage that parents can inflict on their children. His Victor is the product of a coddling mother (Mia Goth), who dies young and leaves him emotionally adrift, and a domineering father (Charles Dance), who molds him into a brilliant but heedless inventor. Victor’s tragic flaw is that instead of learning from his abusive upbringing, he treats the creature as an unwanted child.
“The usual discourse of Frankenstein has to do with science gone awry,” del Toro says. “But for me, it’s about the human spirit. It’s not a cautionary tale: It’s about forgiveness, understanding and the importance of listening to each other.” It’s a story that del Toro first fell in love with watching James Whale’s “Frankenstein” as a kid growing up in Mexico. The young Guillermo wasn’t drawn to Victor Frankenstein, but to the outsider: a flat-topped monster with bolts on his neck. “He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid.”
Like many of del Toro’s films, “Frankenstein” is a monster movie in which humans are the real villains, and the beasts they fear are the true victims. Del Toro told Elordi and Isaac that he was as inspired by telenovelas and opera as he was by Gothic horror stories.
“It’s through the prism of this intense Latin American point of view,” Isaac says. “It’s this decidedly European story told with a very un-European approach. There was one moment when I was looking at the monitors and seeing this castle in Edinburgh, and all this sumptuousness. And I was like, ‘Is it too much?’” Isaac playfully puts on a heavy Spanish accent to mimic his director. “And he’s like, ‘Cabrón, there’s a reason why my Victor is played by Óscar Isaac Hernández!’”
To bring the creature to life, Victor turns his laboratory into a grotesque chophouse, filling it with severed arms, legs, heads and torsos that he hacks away at and screws together as blood and viscera cake every surface. And when he does emerge, the creature is a killing machine, dispensing with sailors, hunters and even a pack of wolves by cracking open their skulls. Yet del Toro doesn’t see the film as a scary movie. “Ridiculous as it may sound, I see it as a biography of these characters,” he says.
As in many adaptations of the story, Victor is a brilliant scientist who realizes too late that he cannot control the creature he has created. But this is also the most Freudian interpretation of Shelley’s “Frankenstein” yet. When not railing against religion and social conventions, Victor is constantly nursing a glass of milk. Goth’s character may be off-screen, but she isn’t far.
“Guillermo would always be like, ‘He wants that lechita,’” Isaac says. “When everything goes wrong, he just wants that mama’s milk.” (To drive the point home, Goth plays both Victor’s mother and Elizabeth, the woman he falls in love with who happens to be betrothed to his brother.)
Del Toro’s adaptation of the 207-year-old story feels modern, but his approach is old school. In Toronto, the “Frankenstein” crew built 360-degree versions of both the lab and the ship on which Victor and the creature have their final confrontation. Some directors would have used a green-screen and computers to cut costs, but del Toro felt it was important to assemble a world for his actors to inhabit. “I want real sets,” del Toro explains. “I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship. I want people painting, building, hammering, plastering.”
After “Frankenstein,” Elordi underwent another transformation to portray Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” As he channeled the Emily Brontë antihero earlier this year outside London, he was shocked when a grunt escaped from his own throat.
“It was one of my first scenes,” Elordi says with a laugh. “The other actor said something, and I went ‘Wwooouuuugh!’” He re-creates his deep groan from the del Toro movie — wounded and childlike. “Because I had learned to respond to everything with a grunt. Something was still there.”
Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac on the set of “Frankenstein”
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Despite the momentary identity crisis, Elordi has moved on and has several projects in the can. Indeed, “Frankenstein” will be premiering at a busy time for both its stars. After the Venice gala, Isaac will fly to Telluride to screen a secret documentary that involves him. Then he travels back to Venice for the debut of “In the Hand of Dante,” a mob drama directed by Julian Schnabel. Over the course of his career, Isaac has moved seamlessly between franchises such as “Star Wars” and “X-Men” and auteur-driven fare like “Ex Machina.” (When asked if he’d return as Poe Dameron, he borrows a line from “The Simpsons” in a high-pitched child’s voice: “I’m a Star Wars.” Then he says, “Yeah, I’d be a Star Wars again if there was something good to do with that.”)
Isaac says there’s no grand strategy behind his choices. “It’s just about ‘Is there something in a film that I love enough that when that alarm goes off in the morning, I’m ready and wanting to go to work?’” he says. “‘Is there enough in it to pull me across the finish line?’”
In talking about his own professional choices, Elordi turns to Isaac: “I love what you just said,” Elordi says. “For me, it’s like, ‘Do I need this every single day? Is this consuming my sleep? Is it everything?’”
Elordi’s turn as Nate in “Euphoria” has been shrouded in secrecy, especially as HBO has been working since 2022 to reassemble the A-list cast that includes Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney. “I was pretty busy,” Elordi says when asked if he was concerned the show wouldn’t return. “But I will say it’s really nice to be back. It’s been eight years or something since I started. It’s just lovely to see all these people that you’ve grown up with. It’s the same crew, the same cast.”
And he’s excited that creator Sam Levinson is using 65mm film to shoot the new season, a rarity given the prevalence of digital cameras. “Visually, what I’m seeing is incredible,” he says. “It looks really good.” (He’s not certain if the other characters are also jumping forward in time: “I don’t really know what anyone else is doing. It’s all quite separate.”)
But as he looks ahead to his own life, Elordi longs for another project that will push him as an actor, demanding everything he has and more, just like he experienced on “Frankenstein.” “It changed me fundamentally — changed the way that I approach performance and the way that I watch movies,” he says.
While making the film, del Toro says he came to believe Elordi was “superhuman.” Not only did the actor endure grueling hours, but he put his body on the line, running barefoot through a forest and scaling the side of a ship. “Never once did he come to me and complain,” del Toro marvels. “Never once did he come to me and say, ‘I’m tired. I’m hungry. Can I go?’ And he put in 20-hour days.”
But Isaac says there was one time when even Elordi showed the strain he was under. “It was like after the eighth take of having to carry Mia through a crowd and down the steps of a mansion,” Isaac says. “He was like, ‘Why are we going again, Guillermo?’ And then he said, ‘OK, just because, you know, I am a person.’”
Person or not, the creature prevailed. “And then,” Isaac continues, “he did it again.”
Styling (Elordi): Wendi and Nicole; Styling (Isaac): Jan-Michael Quammie/The Wall Group; Grooming (Elordi): Amy Komorowski/The Wall Group; Grooming (Isaac): Tim Dolan/Tracey Mattingly; Fashion Credits, Elordi (all looks): Bottega Veneta; Fashion Credits, Isaac (cover): Sweater: Miu Miu ; Pants: Calvin Klein Collection; Watch: Cartier; Fashion Credits. Isaac (non-cover images): Coat and Turtleneck: Celine; Pants: Calvin Klein
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