Jacob Elordi Is Unrecognizable as Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Monster in First Look

Guillermo del Toro and Netflix’s Frankenstein has risen to become one of the most highly anticipated classic monster movie remakes since Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu hit theaters late last year. Obviously, a lot of that has to do with the creative team involved with the film; del Toro (The Shape of Water) is an Oscar-winning talent whose signature is designing and realizing fantastical worlds and creatures onscreen, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is the exact kind of weighty, stylized horror he excels at (see: Hellboy, Crimson Peak).

The cast of the film is also a stacked ensemble, with Oscar Isaac (Marvel’s Moon Knight) playing Dr. Victor Frankenstein, with Mia Goth (Maxxxine), Fleix Kammerer (All Quiet on the Western Front), Lars Mikkelsen (The Witcher), David Bradley (Harry Potter), Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) and Ralph Ineson (Fantastic Four: First Steps) all rounding out the cast. Most importantly, however, is Euphoria and Saltburn star Jacob Elordi, who will take on the role of “The Creature,” also known as “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

First Look At Jacob Elordi In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

The first-look images of Frankenstein and its monster reveal two looks for Elordi: the first is the cloaked and masked version of the living corpse seen above, presumably disguising himself to move through the everyday world without rousing (too much) suspicion. The second image (see below) shows the Creature in a far more vulnerable moment, hunched down and weighted down in place by Victor Frankenstein, who is presumably doing work on his creation (del Toro appears in the behind-the-scenes shot, coaching Isaac and Elordi through the scene).

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“Jacob is the most perfect actor for the creature,” Guillermo del Toro told Vanity Fair in their interview. “And we have a supernaturally good connection. It’s like, very few words. Very few things I have to say, and he does it.”

There’s an immediate body-horror element that’s apparent in this telling of Frankenstein; Elordi looks like he will be thoroughly transformed into a living corpse, and it will be interesting to see how he plays it, physically. It will be just as intriguing to see how the young actor pulls off the trick of bringing “humanity” to his monster character, and then juxtaposes that soft side to father-son conflict that’s really the heart of this classic horror story.

“This is, for me, the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life. I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a kid and saw Boris Karloff in what became for me an almost religious state. Monsters have become my personal belief system,” del Toro recently recounted during a panel at Netflix’s Tudume event. “There are strands of Frankenstein throughout my films … Exploring the relationship between humanity and monsters, creator and creation, father and son, has consumed my stories again and again. I wanted to make this film before I even had a camera, and I have been actively pursuing it now for 25 years. It has grown so close to me that now it’s a biography.”

Frankenstein will premiere on Netflix in November.