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Jacob Elordi says the strain he put on his body for a TV project helped him get into character for his turn as the iconic monster in Frankenstein.
Elordi, 28, spoke with the Los Angeles Times in an interview published on Thursday, Oct. 16 about his new movie with director Guillermo del Toro. The actor was cast as the Creature in del Toro’s adaptation of the classic 1818 novel after Andrew Garfield dropped out of the movie in late 2023. This left Elordi with only a small window of time to prepare for the part, the outlet reported.
Elordi had been filming a World War II miniseries for Prime Video titled The Narrow Road to the Deep North in his native Australia that required him to lose significant amounts of weight shortly before diving into Frankenstein, he told The Times.
“My brain was kind of all over the place,” Elordi said. “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. And I just realized that it was a blessing with Frankenstein coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering.”
Ken Woroner/Netflix
Elordi costars in Frankenstein with Oscar Isaac; the latter portrays the titular Victor Frankenstein. The movie’s cast also features Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz.
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While Elordi was a late addition to the film, the actor said he felt portraying Frankenstein’s monster was “an absolutely fantastic idea” — one first sparked by a negative internet comment about an early-career performance, he told the L.A. Times. “Someone had written after my first film, ‘The only thing this plank of wood could play is Frankenstein’s Creature. Get him off my screen!’ ” recounted Elordi.
Courtesy of Netflix
Then, while filming 2023’s Priscilla, the Priscilla Presley biopic’s hair and makeup team told Elordi their next project would be del Toro’s Frankenstein. He knew he was meant to also be a part of it.
“It came from some other place,” he told the L.A. Times. “It felt like a growth, like a cancer in my stomach that told me that I had to play this thing. I’ve heard stories about this from actors, and when you hear them, you kind of go, ‘Sure, you were meant to play this thing.’ But I really feel like I was.”
Frankenstein is in theaters Oct. 17 and streams on Netflix starting Nov. 7.
