Jacob Elordi Put Into Full Body Prosthetics 20 Times

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

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

In true del Toro style, however, his creature is not a monster, but one filled with emotion and humanity. And that vision was something prosthetics artist Mike Hill kept in mind when creating his designs for del Toro’s film. “We wanted to stay away from classical zombies or anything like that,” Hill tells Variety.

In the film, Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein, the scientist convinced that he can conquer death and who starts putting together a Creature (Jacob Elordi). He later brings his first experiment to the Royal College of Medicinal Tribunal. “It shows the technique that he developed, rather than having garish stitching, and the way he almost melded this creature together. So it really is a precursor to the final character,” Hill explains.

Hill stresses everything needed to be practical and raw. “With this tale and its period setting, if you go too VFX, you’ve destroyed the illusion. This had to be practical and real.”

Another iteration of Victor’s creature is bent over with its spinal cord exposed in his lab. As for what that needed to look like, Hill says, “We didn’t want the standard corpse that just lay down and sprawled out flat. We wanted to give it a little bit more impact as this body’s folded over, which gives it a more of a dead feel. It’s a little bit more intrusive to the human body to be bent in this position and being opened up at the spine. And I think that we react to that.”

Hill says he has spent a lot of his life dedicated to researching the human body and its inner workings, but for “Frankenstein,” he says, “I had to go even deeper, and he does go on the inside and not the outside.”

The idea of the Creature is that he would be made from body pieces picked from a nearby battlefield. Hill’s design needed to reflect that the Creature’s body was “stitched” together and made up of different color tones.

Despite all the makeup, Hill wanted to try to keep Elordi’s eyes. “We didn’t want to put zombie sockets on his eyes. And actually, Guillermo taught me that trick. He said, ‘If you make the face too garish, then people are focusing here and here, and we need to focus here.’” However, Elordi did end up wearing a brown contact lens to make one of his eyes appear bigger.

“His whole face is covered,” Hill says of the prosthetics. “The only parts that are Jacob are the tip of the nose, the upper lip and his chin. The rest is all rubber prosthetics and a new sculpted brow.” At the time of filming, 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 brow. Stronger brows are always associated with the Frankenstein creature. But I didn’t want to go heavy monster. This is a creature. Frankenstein is building a man and not a monster. So very subtle, but it still gives us that. That brow that is imposing.”

In total, Hill says the team did “the full body probably about 20 times. But he never complained once.” Hill adds, “He used it as his time to become the creature, to become the character.”

Watch the video above.