Jacob Elordi is opening up about how he took his “suffering” while filming an earlier project to help him prepare for his role as Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s new film.
During a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the actor described his “grueling” experience shooting Prime Video’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North shortly before Frankenstein, during which he lost a substantial amount of weight for the World War II miniseries.
“My brain was kind of all over the place,” Elordi recalled. “I had these moments of great anguish at around 3 a.m. in the morning. I’d wake and my body was in such pain.”
However, the Euphoria star said he was actually able to use his exhaustion, both mentally and physically, to help prepare himself to take on the complex creature. “I just realized that it was a blessing with Frankenstein coming up, because I could articulate these feelings, this suffering,” he explained.
Elordi said the film also came at a perfect time for him personally, as he had been struggling with his purpose as an actor and “the unbearable weight of being.”
“At that time in my life, I really wanted to hide,” he admitted. “I really wanted to go away for a while. I was desperate to find some kind of normalcy and rebuild the way that I acted and how I approached making movies. And when the film came along, I remember being like, ‘Ugh, I really wanted to go away right now.’ And I realized immediately the Creature was where I was supposed to go away to. I was supposed to go into that mask of freedom.”
Despite the grueling makeup process to transform into Frankenstein each day throughout filming, the Saltburn actor admitted that he was actually “liberated in this makeup.”
“I didn’t have to be this version of myself anymore,” Elordi added. “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. It was based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic, David Rooney, wrote in his review, “The genre-defying craftsman’s sumptuous retelling of Frankenstein honors the essence of the book in that it’s not so much straight-up horror as tragedy, romance and a philosophical reflection on what it means to be human.” He added, “One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.”
