Jacob Elordi’s ‘Frankenstein’ Performance Was Inspired His Dog

In Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi joins the likes of Boris Karloff, Robert De Niro, and Christopher Lee in portraying Frankenstein’s monster. However, a key element of the Saltburn actor’s inspiration came from someone totally unexpected-his Golden Retriever.

“When I first read the script, I had a lot of ideas about what it means to be constructed of parts,” he reveals during a panel for a handful of journalists at Netflix HQ in Los Angeles. “That included things like what it means to have the calf from somebody else, a part of your brain from here, a part of your face from there, and how the communication would work between your brain and the muscles. Something that was really instrumental was him. I had a great idea to study Butoh, a Japanese dance form known for its themes of death. It’s sort of about the reanimation of a corpse, which was a helpful way to get inside my body.”

“I then spent an agonizing amount of time in front of the mirror, which was just like my regular day,” Elordi jokes. “I read a baby development book. I watched the children around me, which was also bizarre, and I spent a lot of time watching my dog. My dog has this great innocence in the way that she moves and looks at things. There was actually this wonderful moment in the hotel in Toronto just before we started, and I was looking at her thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ I was staring at her; she was staring back at me. She walked up to me, and we touched noses, exchanging a little static electricity. I knew then I was okay. It was like she gave me life. These are all real things that happened by just being open to it.”

‘Frankenstein’ Is A Labor of Love

This latest adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale sees Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation. As well as the two stellar leads, Frankenstein also boasts an ensemble cast that includes Inglourious Basterds‘ Christoph Waltz, MaXXXine‘s Mia Goth, The Golden Child‘s Charles Dance, and All Quiet on the Western Front‘s Felix Kammerer. It lands in select theaters from Friday, October 17, 2025, before heading to streaming on Netflix on Friday, November 7, 2025.

Del Toro, who wrote and directed Frankenstein, began developing his vision in 2008, and it started to take shape in a major way about three years ago. That’s when he reached out to Isaac.

“I have tried to write it one time before, and I always knew it was two sides of the tale,” the filmmaker recalls. “I called Oscar, we had some Cuban food, and I started writing it for him. About a year later, I showed him the opening and closing 30 pages.”

Isaac adds, “It was just a general meeting. It wasn’t about Frankenstein. It was just going over to his house. Guillermo says he doesn’t even take general meetings, but something was in the air. We just started talking for an hour or two hours, and at the end of it, he said, ‘I want you to be Victor in Frankenstein.’ You have code names for the films while you’re working on them, and the one for us was Prodigal Father because the father is the one who goes away and has to come back and basically say sorry.”

Del Toro interjects, “What was very difficult to decide structurally was when the hinge would come? When will we go to the second story? I didn’t want to repeat too many events. What happens as a father is, you have your children, then they go into the world, and you know very little after that, then they come back and tell you what happened to them and how it’s rooted in you or not. That’s what sold it.”

Becoming ‘Frankenstein’s Creature Was ‘Torture’

For Elordi, working on Frankenstein was a journey into cinema, and especially the horror genre. As well as learning from del Toro, it’s something that came out of the relationship the actor formed with monster maestro and the man behind the prosthetics, Mike Hill. Hill previously worked with the director on Nightmare Alley and The Shape of Water.

“I got like a professor’s education in monster films from Mike,” the actor enthuses. “I learned about a whole world of film that I wasn’t privy to. We watched all the films, discussed them, and also watched interviews about the films. So, whilst there was perhaps an element of physical torture; it was one of the great experiences to work with someone like Mike.”

A significant portion of the bonding occurred in the chair during the grueling effects application process.

“Our call time was midnight some nights, so we hadn’t gotten any sleep,” Hill recalls. “We’d go to work at midnight, and we start putting the appliances on Jacob for ten hours. It would take until the morning sun came up. When I first met Jacob, I said to him, ‘Look, we were going to fall in love with each other or we’re going to hate each other,’ because he’s meeting someone at that time of the morning, every morning, to glue stuff on his face, and me not wanting to because he doesn’t want me to. That actually never happened, though, because we became great friends, and I applaud Jacob every time.”

“To go through what he did is torture. If you sit in a chair for ten hours, not move, and have people pushing, prodding, gluing, you name it, it’s a nightmare, and this man sat there like a consummate professional. I never heard one complaint, and we did it 56 times. There were 42 rubber pieces glued to his body, and the man never complained once.”

Elordi adds, “There’s this amazing moment at the end of every day where they’d want you to do visual effects, and you have to go into a booth. I learned that I could rip the prosthetic from the top, so before I could get to the visual effects tent, I was peeling it off, and all this steam would come out, then I was free.”

Hill has nothing but praise for the Australian given the job of playing the iconic creation. Stating that they couldn’t have done the movie without the Euphoria and Priscilla actor, the special-effects artist utilized his “physicality, acting range and innocence” that he brought to The Creature to influence his design.

“We knew that despite the scars and the deformity that the Victor had done to this poor guy, his humanity would shine through because of Jacob,” he reveals. “That was the key, but that has always been the key with a good monster. Guillermo wisely told me that the eyes are the focus, so every line on that face has to direct you to look at Jacob’s eyes. We could have easily created a garish, ugly monster that would have shocked you the first time, but you would have been bored by the third time you saw it. We were making a person. We were not making a monster.”

Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Is A Love Letter Of Sorts

Frankenstein is the latest manifestation of del Toro’s long-running love affair with classic literature and the gothic. Whether it’s Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, or The Shape of Water, the influence is omnipresent on the screen.

“I have dedicated my life to the Romantic movement and Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Gothic literature. This is decades of study and absorption,” he enthuses. “My Frankenstein is an amalgam of her biography, my biography, the Romantic movement, the novel, et cetera, et cetera. The movie is not just the book, and Mary Shelley is not just that book.”

“When people think about poets now, they don’t realize that these people were punks. These people were iconoclasts. When Waterloo happened, some of the first people to ride into the battlefield were poets, including Lord Byron. I would actually exchange my entire career for an afternoon having tea with Mary Shelley or the Brontë sisters. This movie is a complete act of love that has taken so many decades to create, and I hope it is at least sincere. By the way, in her lifetime, the novel was turned into theater plays that were not very faithful to the novel in many other ways, so I know she accepted them. They didn’t even ask her about creating the play. Adapting a book is like marrying a widow. You have to respect the late husband, but on Saturdays, you are allowed to get it on.”

Del Toro concludes, “As to what people take out of a movie, I provide the supermarket, not the shopping list. Buy whatever the f**k you need. As a director, I’m not a guest. I don’t demand anything from you. I’m a host. I make a big banquet for you, we all cook, and then you sit down and eat whatever the hell you want. When I was growing up, one of the most important movies I watched was La Oveja Negra, a father-son story that would make me cry. For me, the melodrama in Frankenstein has to have that. In the world we live in now, a lot of people are scared of emotion. They find it really corny. I don’t. I think emotion is the new punk. It’s the new anarchy. We got to rebel and say, ‘To all that wisdom you bring with your irony, to all that callousness you bring with your certainty, well, I give you this emotion and f**k you.'”