“There was something trapped between my ribs that has been released.”  Jacob Elordi had to be ‘buried alive’ for 10 hours a day under makeup and prosthetics to become Frankenstein.

This role was not only an acting challenge but also a physical battle, and he revealed a secret that commands everyone’s respect.

When the lights came up at the Sala Grande during the 82nd Venice Film Festival on 3 September 2025, the audience did something almost unheard of in 2025: they rose as one and applauded for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.

Guillermo del Toro, visibly moved, kept trying to quiet the room so the credits could roll, but no one would sit down. The reason? A seven-foot-tall, stitched-together creature with translucent skin, exposed bone, and eyes that somehow looked both ancient and newborn had just broken every heart in the theatre.

The creature was played by Jacob Elordi, the 6’5″ Australian heart-throb once dismissed as “the Kissing Booth guy.” In ninety minutes he had demolished that label forever.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is not another retelling of the 1818 novel or the 1931 Karloff classic. It is a gothic fever dream set in a rain-soaked 1930s Europe on the brink of war, where the Creature is less monster than abandoned child, less abomination than mirror to humanity’s worst impulses.

Critics have called it “the first truly adult Frankenstein,” and the first to make the Creature genuinely erotic, terrifying, and tragic in the same breath. At the centre of that impossible trifecta stands Elordi, unrecognisable under pounds of silicone, yak hair, and hand-painted veins.

The physical ordeal began at 2 a.m. every shooting day.

Elordi would arrive at a freezing Pinewood soundstage where a team of twelve prosthetic artists, led by eight-time Oscar winner David White (The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth), began the ten-hour process of “burying him alive.” First came the full-body silicone suit, vacuum-sealed to his skin.

Then the individual pieces: a cracked skull cap, a protruding brow ridge, exposed ribs made of dental acrylic, and a lower arms that added eight inches to his already towering frame.

The neck bolts—iconic but re-imagined as rusted surgical screws—were the last to go on, screwed directly into the prosthetic torso so they could not shift during takes.

“I couldn’t sit,” Elordi told The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast on 14 November 2025. “There was a custom coffin-like box on set. Between set-ups I had to lie flat in it because if I bent at the waist the suit would tear.

So for six months I spent ten to twelve hours a day literally in a box. The crew started calling it ‘Jacob’s coffin. I’d listen to podcasts through noise-cancelling headphones because I couldn’t move my head more than a few degrees.

That’s when I understood what the Creature feels like—trapped in a body that isn’t yours, waiting for someone to let you out.”

The weight of the suit was 68 pounds. Combined with the restrictive spine piece, Elordi lost 24 pounds during filming despite eating 5,000 calories a day. His knees swelled so badly that del Toro shut down production for four days so he could receive cortisone injections.

Yet he never complained on set. “He’d just close his eyes, breathe through the pain, and when Guillermo called action he became this eight-foot-tall abandoned child,” co-star Christoph Waltz (who plays a vastly re-imagined Victor Frankenstein) recalled. “I’ve worked with a lot of actors. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

But the real revelation came in that same Awards Chatter episode. Host Scott Feinberg asked Elordi why, at only 28, he had risked his body and his matinee-idol image on something this extreme. Elordi paused for almost ten seconds—an eternity on a podcast—then said quietly:

“There was something trapped between my ribs that has been released. I don’t know how else to explain it. I’ve spent years playing versions of the hot guy, the fantasy, the safe choice. And I felt… not fake, exactly, but like I was wearing someone else’s skin.

When they sealed that final neck bolt every morning, something clicked. For the first time the outside finally matched what I had been carrying inside. I wasn’t Jacob anymore. I was something that had never been loved and was furious and terrified about it. And I could finally scream.”

He continued, voice cracking: “I didn’t know I was holding that much loneliness until I got to play a place where I was allowed to be ugly and broken and still deserve compassion. I think that’s why the Creature cries blood in the film. It’s mine.”

The internet lost its collective mind. Within hours #SomethingTrappedBetweenMyRibs was trending worldwide. Young men, in particular, flooded social media with stories of feeling “too tall, too awkward, too much” in a world that only wanted them decorative. Elordi’s confession became a quiet movement.

Critics have been just as effusive. The film currently holds a 96 % on Rotten Tomatoes and became, in its first month, the most-watched English-language film in Netflix history, surpassing even Red Notice. More importantly, Elordi has emerged as the indisputable frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor at the 2026 Oscars.

He has already won the Volpi Cup in Venice, the Gotham Award, the Critics Choice, and—on 28 November 2025—the New York Film Critics Circle prize.

When he accepted the latter, he thanked the makeup team by bringing all twelve of them on stage, then lay down in the coffin-box prop one last time so the audience could understand what he had endured.

Del Toro, never one to mince words, told Variety: “I’ve made many creatures in my career. This one made himself. Jacob didn’t act the Creature. He became the place where every unloved child could finally be seen. That’s not performance. That’s alchemy.”

As awards season accelerates, one image keeps circulating: Elordi at the Governors Awards two weeks ago, immaculate in Tom Ford tuxedo, 6’5″ frame folded into a chair, gently touching the spot between his ribs as if checking that whatever was once trapped there is truly gone.

Beside him, del Toro raises a glass and mouths a single word: “Alive.”

For the first time in his career, Jacob Elordi doesn’t have to pretend to be human. He simply, finally, is.