Jacob Elordi Opens Up About Playing Frankenstein’s Creature. He revealed his only hesitation before joining Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — he feared the Creature would be a silent, wordless role. But after reading the script, Elordi was thrilled to find a deeply emotional and articulate version, true to Mary Shelley’s original novel. To prepare, he even created a “Creature diary,” documenting the monster’s inner turmoil throughout filming. The Netflix Gothic masterpiece also stars Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz, and is being praised for its haunting beauty and emotional depth.

Jacob Elordi wanted his take on Frankenstein’s monster to be fearless, powerful, and vocal. The actor, whose portrayal of the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has already garnered critical praise as a highlight of the film, recently shared an early qualm he held about signing onto the now potentially career-defining role.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Elordi revealed that while he would have played “anything in the film,” the prospect of embodying the Creature particularly excited him from the early stages of production. “There is only one character that I wanted to play in Guillermo’s Frankenstein, and that’s the Creature. So there’s no hesitation in that regard,” he explained.

Despite Elordi’s enthusiasm about appearing in del Toro’s adaptation of the classic Mary Shelley novel, the star said that prior to reading the script, he had concerns that the Creature would be yet another silent, grunting take on the famously tormented character.

“The only thought that I can remember having before I’d even gotten the script was that — and I shouldn’t have doubted it, knowing Guillermo — but was that the Creature may be nonverbal and may be so sort of conceptual and hidden under this thing,” Elordi added. “Obviously, there’s always a performance in those creatures, but just that I wouldn’t be able to maybe articulate the sort of existential crisis that the Creature’s having.”

Fortunately for the actor, these concerns quickly disappeared after he cracked open del Toro’s screenplay. “As soon as I read the script and he said, ‘Now, I’ll tell you my tale,’ and I realized there was still this much script to go,” Elordi continued before praising the work’s similarities to its source material. “I was like, oh, wow, this is the Creature as it is in Mary Shelley’s text.”

Jacob Elordi Created a Creature Diary

Embodying del Toro’s script wasn’t the only way Elordi was able to verbalize the Creature’s struggles. Throughout the course of production, the star said he transformed an “old book full of Arthur Rackham ink sketches” into a character diary for the famed monster.

“There was this massive book, and one page would have an ink sketch, and then the other side was blank. And somehow, between hearing about the project and talking to Guillermo, from that point to the end of the thing, I’d filled this, like, tome, I suppose, this kind of giant diary, which was completely from the perspective of the Creature,” he recalled of crafting a “giant bible” for his character, one he completed on the final day of shooting.

“When I saw the end result, it felt like it had come out of a fugue state,” Elordi continued, noting that strange occurrences like that weren’t uncommon while working with del Toro. “There was a lot of stuff that happened like that, which Guillermo had warned me of when we spoke,” the actor spilled of the storied director. “There’s a magic that runs through the veins of his films, like a genuine magic. And I got to experience that the whole process.”

The critically acclaimed Gothic film also stars Oscar Isaac as the titular character, Mia Goth as Lady Elizabeth Harlander, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, and Ralph Ineson.