Jacob Elordi opens up about how he harnessed his "suffering" from an earlier project to propel him into his role as Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro's latest film. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the actor recounts his "grueling" experience shooting Prime Video's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, just before Frankenstein, during which he lost a significant amount of weight for the World War II miniseries.
"My brain was a whirlwind of emotions," Elordi recalls. "I had moments of profound anguish at around 3 a.m. in the morning. I'd wake up and my body was in such pain." Despite this, the Euphoria star says he was able to channel his exhaustion, both mentally and physically, into preparing for the complex creature role. "I realized that it was a blessing with Frankenstein coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering," he explains.
Elordi adds that the film also came at a pivotal moment in his personal life, as he was grappling with his purpose as an actor and the "unbearable weight of being." "At that time in my life, I really wanted to hide," he admits. "I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild my approach to acting and making movies. And when the film came along, I remember thinking, 'Ugh, I really wanted to go away right now.' And I realized immediately that the Creature was where I was supposed to go—into that mask of freedom."
Despite the grueling makeup process that transformed him into Frankenstein each day during filming, Elordi admits he was actually "liberated" in this makeup. "I didn't have to be this version of myself anymore," he adds. "In those six months, I completely rebuilt myself. And I came out of this film with a whole new skin."
Frankenstein, which also stars Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz, is set to be released on Friday in select theaters and on Nov. 7 on Netflix. Based on Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, it is a genre-defying retelling that honors the essence of the book as much as it is a tragedy, romance, and a philosophical reflection on what it means to be human. As David Rooney, chief film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, wrote in his review: "One of del Toro's finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling, and artistry."
