“I thought I was going to freeze to death, but this was the only way to bring my childhood dream from Lord of the Rings back to life!” The words tumble out of Jacob Elordi like a confession, his voice cracking with the raw edge of memory as he leans forward in a plush armchair at a downtown Toronto hotel. It’s December 2, 2025, just weeks after Netflix unleashed Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein upon the world, and the 28-year-old Australian actor is still thawing—from the literal chill of a brutal shoot and the emotional firestorm of portraying cinema’s most tragic monster. Elordi’s eyes, those piercing blue pools that have mesmerized audiences from Euphoria’s Nate Jacobs to Saltburn’s brooding Oliver, mist over as he recounts the ordeal: three relentless days and nights in the bone-numbing -35°C grip of Northern Ontario’s wilderness, his face entombed under 54 meticulously crafted silicone prosthetics that clung like a second, suffocating skin. “It was hell,” he admits, rubbing his hands together as if chasing away phantom frostbite. “But in that moment of breaking—when Guillermo whispered those words that shattered me—I found the Creature. Not just the monster everyone fears, but the heartbreakingly beautiful soul the world now admires.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which premiered on Netflix November 7, 2025, isn’t just another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic masterpiece—it’s a visceral resurrection, a $160 million opus blending del Toro’s signature blend of horror, heart, and handmade wonder. Starring Oscar Isaac as the brilliant but hubristic Victor Frankenstein, Mia Goth as the enigmatic Lady Elizabeth, and Christoph Waltz as the shadowy patron fueling Victor’s ambitions, the film clocks in at a lush 2 hours and 45 minutes, weaving Shelley’s tale of creation and rejection into a fable of empathy amid isolation. But it’s Elordi, towering at 6-foot-5 and transformed into the unnamed Creature, who steals the thunder. Critics are already buzzing with Oscar whispers—Variety called his performance “a tour de force of silent agony,” while The Hollywood Reporter dubbed it “the most humane monster since Boris Karloff’s 1931 turn.” Audiences, streaming in record numbers (82 million hours viewed in its first weekend), have flooded social media with teary confessions: “Elordi’s Creature broke me. He’s not scary—he’s us.”

For Elordi, the role was destiny wrapped in dread. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia, the son of a landscape surveyor and a high school guidance counselor, young Jacob was a voracious reader and film fiend, devouring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy alongside Shelley’s Frankenstein by age 12. “Those books were my escape,” he shared in a recent Vanity Fair profile. “Gollum’s duality—the wretched creature twisted by the Ring’s corruption—mirrored the Creature’s isolation in Frankenstein. Both are outcasts, yearning for connection but doomed by their makers. I scribbled fan art of Gollum as a stitched-up giant, dreaming of playing something that raw.” That childhood sketchbook fantasy simmered through his breakout roles: the brooding heartthrob in The Kissing Booth trilogy, the volatile intensity of Euphoria, the sly eroticism of Saltburn. But del Toro’s long-gestating Frankenstein—announced in 2011, revived by Netflix in 2023 after Universal’s cold feet—ignited it. “When Guillermo called, saying he’d seen my audition tape and felt ‘the loneliness in your eyes,’ I wept,” Elordi recalls. “This was my Gollum—my chance to embody the monster with a soul.”

Del Toro, the 61-year-old Mexican auteur behind Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water (which netted him a Best Director Oscar in 2018), and Nightmare Alley, has spent decades chasing Frankenstein’s ghost. “Mary Shelley’s novel isn’t horror—it’s a lament for the abandoned,” he told IndieWire in a post-premiere chat. “The Creature isn’t evil; he’s a child starved of love, lashing out in pain. Jacob understood that instinctively.” Casting Elordi was a coup: Andrew Garfield was initially attached as the Creature, but SAG-AFTRA strikes and scheduling snags opened the door. Elordi, fresh off Saltburn’s awards buzz, auditioned via self-tape from London— a haunting monologue from Shelley’s text, delivered in guttural whispers and shadowed lighting. “He arrived broken open,” del Toro gushed in a Netflix Tudum feature. “Tall, vulnerable, with eyes that hold centuries of hurt. Perfect.”

Principal photography kicked off February 12, 2024, in Toronto’s cavernous Pinewood Studios, where production designer Tamara Deverell conjured Victor’s electrified laboratory from blueprints inked by del Toro himself. But the film’s soul demanded the wild: exteriors spanned Scotland’s mist-shrouded Edinburgh Royal Mile (for Victor’s university haunts), East Lothian’s Seacliff Beach (where the Creature first tastes salt air), and Aberdeenshire’s Dunecht House (the Frankenstein family estate, its Palladian arches dripping gothic melancholy). Yet, for the Creature’s “birth” sequence—a pivotal 12-minute tour de force of lightning-cracked skies and rebirth agony—the production ventured north to Ontario’s unforgiving frontier. “We needed isolation, purity,” del Toro explained. “Northern Ontario’s boreal forests, with their endless white and whispering pines, echoed the Creature’s virgin terror. And the cold? It was the forge for Jacob’s fire.”

Filming wrapped September 30, 2024, after a 100-day odyssey marred by blizzards and budget overruns (del Toro’s penchant for practical effects added $20 million in prosthetics alone). But nothing tested Elordi like Week 7: the “Awakening” shoot at Killarney Provincial Park, 400 kilometers north of Toronto, where Georgian Bay’s frozen shores plunged to -35°C under relentless Arctic winds. The sequence depicts the Creature’s first stirrings—stitched from scavenged cadavers, jolted alive by Victor’s galvanic storm—emerging into a snow-swept wilderness, his senses assaulted by light, sound, and solitude. For authenticity, del Toro insisted on location work: no green screen, no soundstage facsimile. “The cold would strip Jacob bare,” the director decreed. “His shivers would be real; his rage, born of frost.”

Elordi’s transformation began at dawn each day, a four-hour siege in a heated makeup tent that felt like a sauna next to the tundra. Prosthetics wizard Mike Hill, whose credits include Pan’s Labyrinth’s Pale Man and The Batman’s Penguin, led the charge. “Guillermo wanted the Creature tender yet terrifying—a patchwork Adonis, beautiful in his ruin,” Hill told Collider. Drawing from Bernie Wrightson’s iconic 1983 illustrated Frankenstein (a del Toro bible), they crafted 54 custom silicone pieces: jagged scars mapping his torso like fault lines, asymmetrical cheek prosthetics elevating his jaw into a perpetual snarl of confusion, and elongated fingers tipped with translucent nails evoking unearthed roots. “Each scar tells a story,” Elordi mused. “This one from a drowned sailor, that from a plague victim—echoes of lives stolen to birth mine.” The face alone required 22 pieces, glued with medical adhesive that burned like ice on raw skin, topped by a bald cap and contact lenses tinting his eyes milky white. “It weighed seven pounds,” Elordi said. “Breathing felt like sucking air through a straw. And in -35°C? It froze solid after 20 minutes.”

The shoot spanned three days and nights—del Toro’s nod to the novel’s three-day gestation motif—capturing the Creature’s lurch from lab slab to forest exile. Day 1: The birth, filmed in a custom-built “anatomy theater” amid Killarney’s quartzite ridges, where Elordi, bolted to a tilting rig, convulsed under simulated lightning (practical arcs from industrial generators). “My muscles seized from the cold before the shocks even hit,” he laughed ruefully. Crew huddled in parkas, breath fogging like ghosts, while del Toro paced in a fur-lined parka, barking adjustments: “More wonder in the eyes, Jacob! He’s seeing God for the first time!” Night fell early, plunging temperatures to -40°C with wind chill; Elordi’s prosthetics cracked audibly, silicone splintering like eggshells. Medics monitored for hypothermia, IV fluids pumping warmth into veins numbed blue.

Day 2 blurred into delirium. The Creature’s forest odyssey—stumbling through snowdrifts, pawing at frozen streams, recoiling from his reflection in an ice-rimed pond—demanded 14-hour takes. Elordi’s mobility, already hampered by the suit’s rigidity, turned treacherous: one slip on glare ice sent him tumbling 10 feet down a embankment, prosthetics shearing off in chunks. “I lay there, face-down in powder, thinking, ‘This is it—I’ll be the actor who freezes mid-monster,'” he recounted to GQ. Crew hauled him up with ropes; del Toro knelt beside him, gloved hand on shoulder: “Breathe the pain, mi amigo. It’s his birthright.” But by hour 10, exhaustion crested. Elordi’s core temperature dipped to 34°C; medics threatened shutdown. “I was hallucinating—seeing Gollum in the trees, whispering ‘Precious’ as the wind howled,” he confessed. That night, under a canopy of stars sharp as diamonds, he huddled by a propane heater, silicone remnants peeling like shed skin, whispering to himself: “For the dream. For Guillermo. For the boy who sketched this in Brisbane.”

Dawn of Day 3 broke with a blizzard, visibility nil, forcing a pivot to the emotional core: the Creature’s first human encounter—a fleeting glimpse of a trapper’s cabin, evoking rejected longing. Elordi, reprised in full regalia, staggered to the mark, limbs leaden, face a mask of frost-laced agony. The take stretched to 22 minutes—del Toro’s longest single shot—capturing the Creature’s guttural wails echoing off La Cloche Mountains. But midway, Elordi’s resolve fractured. “I couldn’t feel my lips, my eyes stung from tears freezing on lashes,” he said. “I signaled cut, ripped off a glove, and just… broke. ‘Guillermo, I can’t. It’s too much. I’m done.'” The crew froze—literally—as Elordi sank to his knees in the snow, sobs wracking his frame beneath the prosthetics.

What happened next is the stuff of set legend, whispered in Hollywood like a talisman. Del Toro, who had battled his own demons directing through chronic pain and personal loss, dismissed the ADs and knelt in the drift beside his star. Snow dusted his signature glasses as he cupped Elordi’s chin—prosthetic and all—and leaned in close. “Listen to me, Jacob,” he murmured, voice a gravelly lifeline. “You are not suffering alone. This Creature? He’s every child del Toro never saved, every outcast I couldn’t hug. But you—you’re giving him breath. Your pain is his poetry. And when you rise, the world will see not a monster, but a miracle. Because you’re my precious, Jacob. My ring-bearer.” The words, laced with del Toro’s Tolkien love (a fellow Middle-earth devotee), pierced Elordi’s frost-weary heart. “I bawled like a kid—snot freezing on the scars,” Elordi recalls, voice thick. “It was Gollum’s pity, Frankenstein’s rejection, all colliding. I stood, dusted off, and we rolled. That take? It’s the one in the film. Raw, real, reborn.”

The footage, unedited and unflinching, became the sequence’s backbone—a 7-minute symphony of grunts and gasps, the Creature’s emerald eyes (Elordi’s alone, lenses swapped for the close-up) brimming with bewildered wonder. Post-production at DNEG Vancouver amplified the magic: VFX artists wove digital stitches that wept ichor, while composer Alexandre Desplat’s score swelled with cello dirges evoking a heartbeat’s stutter. “Jacob’s vulnerability sold it,” Desplat told Score: The Podcast. “You hear the cold in every breath—the isolation in every step.”

Frankenstein’s reception has vindicated the torment. With a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score and 8.7 IMDb average, it’s del Toro’s highest-rated since The Shape of Water, praised for humanizing the unholy. Elordi’s turn dominates discourse: “He doesn’t roar; he whimpers—and it shatters you,” raved The New York Times. Fan art floods DeviantArt—Gollum-Frankenstein hybrids, Elordi’s Creature in Hobbiton. At AFI Fest, where del Toro screened a workprint, Elordi received a standing ovation, the director pulling him onstage for a tearful embrace: “You froze for art, mi monstruo hermoso.”

For Elordi, the scars linger sweetly. Frostnip on his fingertips, a faint scar from a snapped prosthetic wire, but chiefly, catharsis. “That whisper from Guillermo? It unlocked everything—the anger, the ache, the ache for belonging,” he reflects. Post-wrap, he retreated to Brisbane, sketching anew: a Creature in the Shire, ring glinting on stitched fingers. “Lord of the Rings was my spark; Frankenstein my forge. Now? I’m chasing the next dream—maybe directing my own monster tale.”

As Netflix’s holiday streams surge, del Toro’s Frankenstein endures as a testament to endurance: actors who freeze for truth, directors who whisper life into shadows. Elordi’s Creature isn’t just admired—he’s adored, a heartbreaking beauty born from -35°C tears. In the words of Shelley’s survivor: “It was on a dreary night of November…” But for Jacob Elordi, it was a frozen dawn in Ontario—and the world thawed with him.