Jacob Elordi Engineered Frankenstein’s Monster — From Look to Behavior

If you were wondering how Guillermo del Toro was going to handle the Creature in his Netflix take on Frankenstein, here is a fun curveball: Jacob Elordi basically built the character from the ground up. Look, voice, movement — the whole package. Not something you usually hear on a big, director-driven project, and I kind of love it.

"I had complete liberty to create [the Creature] the way that I saw it."

That is Elordi, speaking in London to GamesRadar+. He said the first time he read the script, the images of the Creature just started firing in his head, and the rest was figuring out how to make those instincts real on set.

He did not just play the Creature — he engineered it

Elordi, 28 and a BAFTA Film Awards nominee, says del Toro gave him the keys. He was responsible for how the Creature looks and behaves, and he even had the final word on how it moves. That last part matters, because in this version, the monster is stitched together from parts of different corpses — a body that should not move smoothly, and definitely should not sound like it does.

Finding the movement (yes, via Japanese dance)

To make the Creature’s physicality feel haunted and off-kilter, Elordi studied butoh, a form of Japanese dance known for its extreme control and unsettling shapes. He spent a lot of time walking in deliberately strange ways, watching himself in the mirror, and workshopping with people around him. A lot of it got tossed — he admits he regularly heard some version of "too much" — but the trial-and-error helped him land on something that felt true to the screenplay’s logic and the character’s suffering.

Finding the voice (blame the trachea)

He approached the accent the same way: experiment, refine, repeat. One scene in particular became a North Star — Oscar Isaac’s character assembling the Creature and adjusting its trachea. Elordi latched onto that detail and started asking practical questions: If your throat has been relocated, what does that do to your voice? Your breath? Your posture? That tinkering shaped the sound of the Character as much as the walk did.

• What this is: Guillermo del Toro’s gothic drama Frankenstein for Netflix
• Who is in it: Jacob Elordi as the Creature, plus Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, and Christoph Waltz
• When you can watch: November 7 on Netflix
• Process highlights: Elordi designed the Creature’s look, movement, and accent; studied butoh; iterated through mirror work and feedback; grounded choices in the idea of a body assembled from multiple corpses; drew vocal inspiration from a trachea-adjusting build scene

If you are keeping score, that is an unusual amount of actor freedom on a monster movie — and it sounds like del Toro encouraged it. Now we see if all that tinkering pays off when the thing lurches to life in November.