From Heartthrob to Horror Icon: Inside Jacob Elordi’s Grueling Prep to Become Frankenstein’s Creature

I know, another Frankenstein. But Guillermo del Toro is not doing the green skin and bolt-neck greatest hits. His take is stranger, sadder, and very handmade. And Jacob Elordi went all-in to make the Creature feel like something built, not born.

What Elordi signed up for

Elordi plays Victor Frankenstein's Creature, and the look is a full departure from the classic movie monster. No neon-green skin. No cartoon neck hardware. The goal here was a constructed body that looks assembled with intention, not stitched together like a zombie.

The physical transformation (aka: a daily endurance test)

Prosthetics legend Mike Hill and his team turned Elordi into the Creature with an obsessive amount of practical work and basically no VFX safety net. It was a grind, and the numbers are kind of wild:

• 42 prosthetic pieces in total, with 14 just for his head and neck
• 6 to 10 hours in the chair every shooting day, plus fake dentures, large brown contact lenses, and full-body suit work
• Occasional midnight call times where he stayed up all night just to finish fittings
• A 6'5" frame that helped sell the silhouette, but patience that did the real heavy lifting

Hill called Elordi a perfect canvas, but also said the quiet part out loud: without Elordi's patience and commitment, this version of the Creature would not exist.

How he found the voice, the gait, and the headspace

Elordi only had four weeks to get ready before cameras rolled, so he did the thing actors do when they have no time: he disappeared. He cut off his usual emotional and sensory routines to rewire simple daily habits like eating and showering as if he were the Creature. He stood in front of a mirror with dentures in, tested out voices, and worked the physicality nonstop. For movement, he pulled from butoh (a Japanese dance form nicknamed the dance of death) and even studied how his golden retriever, Layla, moves through space. He talked about this blend of influences on Tudum and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

The intense makeup sessions ended up being a gift. Elordi told Jimmy Fallon that all those hours in the chair were oddly liberating because they gave him time to climb into the Creature's fractured reality.

He also brought in some very real pain from another project. While shooting the miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he had to drop a significant amount of weight, and the physical fallout stuck with him. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he connected that experience directly to Frankenstein:

"My brain was kind of all over the place. I had these moments of great anguish at around 3 a.m. in the morning. I’d wake and my body was in such pain. I just realized that it was a blessing with Frankenstein coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering."

Why the Creature looks different this time

Hill and del Toro wanted the audience to feel the craftsmanship. They dodged anything that read as zombie or retro monster. They cited 19th-century anatomists, phrenology models, and surgical texts as reference points, then built a body with visible seams, patches, and puzzle-piece joins that suggest assembly rather than injury. The hair tells the same story: it looks like it came from different scalps, with colors running from chestnut to silver, because this is not a repaired man. He is man-made.

Costume designer Kate Hawley kept that logic going. The Creature wears leather-like bandages, battle-worn coats, and garments stitched together from military scraps. Every piece reinforces who he is and what he lacks: a single, coherent body. It is tactile and raw by design, because del Toro and Hill think too much digital cleanup kills the illusion.

The result

All that prep and all that glue add up to a Creature who reads as tragic and human first, scary second. Elordi is not hiding behind the makeup; he is using it to play vulnerability, rage, and longing. And yes, it sounds miserable to endure, but on screen it feels intentional in the best way.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix.