Jacob Elordi wears full-body prosthetics 20 times

If there’s anyone who’s a master at telling monster stories, it’s Guillermo del Toro.

For years, he’s wanted to tell his own version of “Frankenstein,” and now his reimagining of the classic Mary Shelley novel has finally arrived on Netflix.

But in true del Toro style, his creatures are not monsters, but creatures full of emotion and humanity. And that vision was what prosthetic artist Mike Hill had in mind when creating the design for del Toro’s film. “We wanted to distance ourselves from classic zombies and things like that,” Hill told Variety.

In the film, Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who becomes convinced he can overcome death and begins to assemble the creature (Jacob Elordi). He then took his first experiments to the Royal College of Physicians. “It’s not about fancy stitching, it’s about the techniques he developed and the way he almost fused this creature. So this is really a forerunner of the final character,” Hill explains.

Hill emphasizes everything it takes to be practical and raw. “With this story and its period setting, too much VFX would destroy the illusion. It had to be practical and realistic.”

Another of Victor’s creatures is crouched in his laboratory with its spinal cord exposed. As for what it needed to look like, Hill said: “We didn’t want it to be a standard corpse that just lies flat and spread out. We wanted this body to have a little more impact when it’s folded up. It creates a more dead-like feel. It’s a little more disturbing for the human body to bend in this position and have the spine open. And I think we’re responding to that.”

Hill has spent much of his life studying the human body and its inner workings, but for “Frankenstein,” he says he needed to delve deeper. He studies the inside, not the outside.

The idea for this creature is that it is created from body parts picked up from nearby battlefields. Hill’s design needed to reflect that the creature’s body was “stitched together” and composed of different tones.

No matter how much makeup she wore, Hill wanted to keep Elordi’s eyes on her. “We didn’t want to put zombie sockets in his eyes, and Guillermo actually taught me the trick. He said, ‘If you make your face too flashy, people will focus all over the place, so you need to focus here.'” But Elordi ended up wearing brown contact lenses to make one eye appear bigger.

“His entire face is covered,” Hill says of the prosthesis. “The only parts that are Jacob are the tip of his nose, his upper lip, and his chin. Everything else is rubber prosthetics and newly sculpted eyebrows.” At the time of the photo shoot, Elordi was 26 years old. “I wanted to subtly mature Jacob a little bit, so I gave him a stronger nose and obviously a stronger eyebrow. Stronger eyebrows are always reminiscent of Frankenstein’s creature. But I didn’t want to make it a severe monster. This is a creature. Frankenstein builds a human, not a monster. It’s very delicate, but that gives us that striking eyebrow.”

Hill said the team “did the full body probably 20 times, and he never once complained.” Hill added, “He used that time as a time to become that creature and become that character.”

Watch the video above.