For the last seven months, the 28-year-old Australian actor has spent every working day strapped to a table, encased in 48 pounds of custom silicone, latex, and yak hair, his face sealed beneath layers of prosthetics so thick he could not blink, breathe through his nose, or feel sunlight on his skin. His arms were bolted into rigid extensions that added eighteen inches to his already 6-foot-5 frame. His torso was wrapped in a cooling vest that pumped ice water through tubes to keep him from passing out. And for ten straight hours, five days a week, he was the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s long-dreamed-of Frankenstein, a role that required him to be, in his own words, “buried alive inside my own body.”

Tonight, three weeks after wrapping principal photography in Toronto, he is sitting in the garden of his rented Hollywood Hills home wearing nothing but a thin white T-shirt and sweatpants. The scars are still there: faint red pressure marks along his hairline, a constellation of bruises on his shoulders where the harness dug in, a slight tremor in his left hand when he lifts his coffee. But for the first time since February, he can feel the breeze on his face without a technician peeling silicone away first.

He exhales, long and slow, as if releasing something that has lived between his ribs for almost a year.

“There was something trapped in there,” he says quietly, pressing a palm to his sternum. “Something I didn’t even know was caged. And this… this thing we made… it let it out.”

This is the story of how Jacob Elordi became Frankenstein’s monster, and how the monster, in turn, set Jacob Elordi free.

The Offer That Couldn’t Be Refused (Even If It Might Kill Him)

When Guillermo del Toro called in January 2025, Jacob was in Sydney, sunburnt and exhausted after press for Saltburn’s extended cut. The director did not ask if he wanted to play the Creature. He simply said, “I have been waiting my whole life to make this movie the way it deserves to be made. And I need someone who is willing to disappear completely. Not act like the monster. Become him. Are you willing to suffer?”

Jacob’s answer was immediate. “Yes.”

He did not yet understand what “suffer” would mean.

Del Toro’s vision was uncompromising: no motion-capture, no CGI body, no “safe” shortcuts. The Creature would be practical, visceral, alive in every frame. That meant Jacob would wear the most complex prosthetic makeup suit ever built for a leading actor, designed by legacy effects maestro Shane Mahan and DDG, the same team that turned Colin Farrell into Penguin. Forty-eight pounds of silicone muscle, hand-punched hair, scar tissue, and translucent skin that had to hold up under 8K close-ups. A neck bolt system that locked his head at a permanent 15-degree tilt. Contact lenses so thick he saw the world through a permanent haze. And teeth, actual dental appliances that forced his jaw into the Creature’s signature underbite for up to twelve hours at a time.

The first time they tested the full suit, Jacob lasted forty-seven minutes before ripping the face piece off and vomiting in a trash can.

“I thought I was having a panic attack,” he remembers. “I couldn’t find air. My heartbeat was in my ears. I kept thinking, ‘This is how people die in escape rooms.’ And then Shane looked at me and said, ‘Good. That’s exactly what we want the audience to feel when they see you.’”

Ten Hours a Day Inside the Tomb

Production began in March 2025 on a soundstage outside Toronto that had been converted into a 19th-century laboratory straight out of del Toro’s sketchbooks. Every morning at 3:30 a.m., Jacob arrived for a four-and-a-half-hour application process. Technicians glued, stitched, and airbrushed him into the suit while he lay on a tilted board, listening to Nina Simone and trying not to move.

Once the final seam was sealed, he was locked in. The only parts of his real body that remained exposed were his eyes and the tips of two fingers on his left hand, used to signal distress if something went wrong. Between takes, he could not sit; the spine rig would crack. He could not eat solid food; everything came through a straw hidden in the mouth appliance. He could not use the bathroom without a forty-minute emergency removal that cost the production thousands of dollars. So he simply… didn’t.

“People keep asking what the hardest part was,” he says. “It wasn’t the weight. It wasn’t the heat. It was the loneliness. You’re completely alone inside this thing. You can hear the crew talking, laughing, eating lunch ten feet away, and you might as well be on another planet. There were days I forgot what my own voice sounded like.”

The physical toll was relentless. He lost twenty-two pounds despite a 5,000-calorie daily intake because his body was in constant survival mode. The cooling vest left frostbite-like welts. The neck bolts caused nerve compression that made his right arm go numb for weeks. And because del Toro shot chronologically, the most emotionally brutal scenes, the Creature’s awakening, his rejection, his final moments, were saved for the end, when Jacob was at his most fragile.

The Secret He Carried Beneath the Skin

There is a scene in the film, one that has already been called career-defining by early viewers, where the Creature, after being hunted and beaten, collapses in an icy river and screams, not in rage, but in pure, wordless grief. It is one continuous six-minute take. No cuts. No dialogue. Just Jacob, submerged to the chest in 34-degree water, prosthetics waterlogged and heavy as concrete, roaring until his voice gives out.

What almost no one knows is that the scream was not acting.

Three days before filming that scene, Jacob received a phone call from Australia. His father, John, the man who had coached him through every school play, who had driven him to auditions in a beat-up Toyota, had suffered a massive heart attack. He was stable, but the prognosis was uncertain.

Jacob flew home for thirty-six hours, sat by his dad’s hospital bed, and came straight back to set without telling a soul. He walked into the water tank still wearing the same clothes he’d worn on the plane. When del Toro called action, something inside him broke open.

“I wasn’t the Creature in that moment,” he says now, voice trembling. “I was every kid who ever thought he wasn’t enough for his father to stay. Every time I felt too big, too loud, too much. Every time I thought love was something you had to earn by being perfect. It all came out. I screamed until I had nothing left. And when Guillermo yelled cut, I couldn’t stand up. They had to carry me out.”

He pauses, eyes distant.

“That scream… it wasn’t planned. It was the thing that had been trapped between my ribs my whole life. And the monster let it out.”

The Release

On the final day of shooting, after del Toro called “That’s a wrap on our Creature,” the crew, many in tears themselves, began the two-hour process of removing the suit for the last time. When the final piece of silicone came off Jacob’s face, he looked in the mirror and did not recognize himself. Not because of the scars or the weight loss, but because something fundamental had shifted.

He called his father that night. They spoke for three hours. Not about the movie. About everything they had never said.

“I told him I was scared I’d become the kind of man who runs,” Jacob says. “And he said, ‘Son, you just spent seven months letting the world see every ugly, broken part of you and you didn’t run once. That’s not the man I raised. That’s the man you became.’”

He is quiet for a long time.

“People think the monster is the one who was buried,” he says finally. “But it was me. And Frankenstein didn’t bring me to life. He let me die, just enough, so I could finally start living.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein premieres Christmas Day 2025 on Netflix. Early reactions from test screenings call it “the defining adaptation of Shelley’s novel” and “a masterpiece of empathy.” Critics are already predicting Oscar nominations, not just for del Toro, but for Jacob Elordi in a performance that is being described as “career-redefining,” “devastating,” and “impossible to watch without feeling changed.”

But for Jacob, the real prize is simpler.

He can breathe again.

And somewhere beneath the scars and the memories and the forty-eight pounds of silicone that no longer weigh him down, something that was trapped between his ribs has finally been set free.