‘Frankenstein’s Guillermo Del Toro Calls Jacob Elordi’s Creature “Beautiful”

Although Jacob Elordi is taking on an iconic movie monster with his latest role, he’s apparently still serving face that could make any townsperson drop their pitchforks and torches.

In Frankenstein, which premieres Oct. 17 in select theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix, writer/director Guillermo Del Toro explained that Elordi’s version of the Creature is “staggeringly beautiful, in an otherworldly way.”

The 3x Oscar winner told Entertainment Weekly that he didn’t want to give the audience “the feeling that you were seeing an accident victim that has been patched [together]” haphazardly, noting that the experiment is Dr. Frankenstein’s pride and joy.

“Victor is as much an artist as he is a surgeon, and if he’s been dreaming about this creature for all his life, he’s going to nail it,” added Del Toro. “It looks like a newborn, alabaster creature. The scars are beautiful and almost aerodynamic.”

Del Toro explained that the Creature’s skin is “from different bodies, so it has different colors,” adding: “The hues are pale but almost translucent. It feels like a newborn soul.”

Starring Oscar Isaac as the titular brilliant but egotistical scientist Victor, Frankenstein sees the doctor bring a creature (Elordi) to life with a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to both of their undoings.

Del Toro previously said at a press conference for the film’s Venice Film Festival world premiere, “It was a religion for me. Since I was a kid — I was raised very Catholic — I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world.”