Jacob Elordi says extended makeup sessions in ‘Frankenstein’ helped him fully transform

Jacob Elordi has revealed that the intense hours he spent in the makeup chair while filming Frankenstein came with an unexpected upside.

The 28-year-old actor stars as the Creature opposite Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming adaptation of the classic horror tale.

While speaking at The Hollywood Reporter’s Actors Roundtable, Elordi admitted that preparing for each day of filming required a significant time commitment.

Rather than seeing the lengthy process as a burden, Elordi explained that the extended preparation gave him rare, uninterrupted time to fully immerse himself in the script and shape his ideas for the character.

“It gave me the freedom to be completely expressive,” he said. 

“There were things that I could do in that make-up that I’d never get away with in a regular film.”

Elordi also shared how del Toro framed the prosthetics process from their very first conversation.

“When I spoke to Guillermo the first time, he said, ‘This isn’t a prosthetics process. It’s going to be the sacrament. It needs to be holy. It’s, ‘The Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, and then you step into the church. The time that it takes is what you need to become this thing that’s other.’”

The actor detailed just how demanding the transformation was, noting that when the Creature first appears, the full makeup application took around 10 hours.

“When the Creature is newborn, from head to toe was about 10 hours. When he has clothes on, it was five hours,” Elordi said.

Despite the intensity, he described the experience as a creative gift.

“If you could have 10 hours every day to get ready for the day, it would be the greatest blessing,” he explained. “You learn the screenplay inside out, and then you can put it down and spend another three hours thinking about it, and then not thinking about it.”

“And then all of a sudden, you look up in the mirror and you are gone,” he concluded.