Meet the Artist Behind Jacob Elordi’s Striking Transformation in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein leans into the theme of bad fathers. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) follows his brute father’s footsteps and casts aside his only son, The Creature (played by Jacob Elordi). Victor sees himself in his creation and revolts. 

One of The Creature’s behind-the-scenes creators, designer Mike Hill, is a rather loving father to Shelly’s misunderstood son. Hill embraces the beauty, not the monstrosity of The Creature. It’s all there in the book with his pretty body parts.

In total, Elordi required 42 appliances and 10 hours of makeup time. The result is another deeply human “monster” from Hill and del Toro. They previously worked together on Nightmare Alley, The Shape of Water, and The Cabinet of Curiosities.

Hill spoke with What’s On Netflix about their latest piece of art, the emotionally and visually arresting Frankenstein.

[Original Frankenstein makeup designer] Jack Pierce’s work was very influential when you were a kid. Here’s how you described his work on the creature: “he brought the soul to death.”

Well, that’s a good quote. Let’s use that again, Jack. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Let’s do it. How’d you want to bring soul to death?

To bring soul to it started off with the actor himself. You base it on their physicality, their looks, and their demeanor. Victor’s trying to make something that’s beautiful. He’s not trying to make a Volkswagen; he’s trying to make a Porsche, something sleek and beyond human, and even regal.

Guillermo had announced to me that our first actor was not doing the movie anymore. We were looking for a new creature, so he sent me several different actors that he was considering, and one of them was Jacob. I wasn’t as familiar with Jacob’s work as some of the others, so I watched him in interviews to see what he looked like. Immediately, he had the physicality of being so tall, long, and lean.

But I looked at his eyes, those heavy eyelids and that doe-eyed look. There was a lot of soul there. It’s what this creature needs, because if you don’t have someone with good eyes, it gets lost in the prosthesis. I was planning an elaborate prosthesis, so I knew that the eyes themselves had to have a lot of soul.

FRANKENSTEIN. Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.

In early makeup tests, how did you make sure Jacob’s eyes could communicate as much as possible?

In the early stages, the Creature is a newborn baby, and that is reflected in his looks. During the early scenes, when he is bald and he is an infant, I didn’t shadow as much around his eyes and nose and didn’t give him any maturity. I came as bland as possible so his eyes just shone through.

As the movie progressed and he got older, I started to shade around his eyes more and around the bridge of his nose more to make him adult and squish him in a wee bit, because newborns and little babies, their eyes are so wide apart. I tried to get that look originally, to make his eyes look a bit wider.

When does he come of age?

When he hides out with the family, he’s got middle-length hair. That’s his teenage years. And then, obviously, the long hair is the final adult creature. So that’s how we did the passage of time — these wigs, this hair.

Guillermo has wanted to make this movie for decades. When did you first discuss it as a potential collaboration? What were some of the earliest ideas?

Well, originally we met up with Guillermo, and he went through some of what we wanted to see in this movie, and he gave me some script pages. The script wasn’t finished, but he gave me some. It helped me see the way he wanted to go with this movie, which is not a horror film. I knew that. So that was out the window, and we didn’t do anything that was scary.

What Guillermo was mastering when we talked was telling me what he doesn’t want. To be honest, that’s a good way to work, because if your publisher tells you, “Don’t do this, don’t do this,” you don’t waste your time doing it.

Initially, we discussed that we didn’t want it to look like an accident victim, as some of the Frankenstein designs of the past. If you saw this man, you’d say, “Whoa, he’s been in a bad accident. Someone’s repaired him.” But we wanted it so that when you saw him, you knew it wasn’t an accident – that someone had made him.

So that’s why I came up with the geometric patterns. It’s obvious if you walk in a room and see this man with these wounds — wait a minute, they’re geometric shapes. Someone planned this. Somebody made a pattern here.

The second thing was I was adamant that I needed it to look like it stepped out of the 1800s.

FRANKENSTEIN. Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.

How did you want to accomplish that?

You can design a very nice, scary movie creature that looks like it came from 2025, but I didn’t want that. It had to literally look like he stepped out of a textbook, and that meant controlling myself and pulling back a wee bit. What people were reacting to was the fact that he was nearly seven feet tall, had pale skin and stitches, was super strong, and was covering wounds. People, just like human beings, consider that a monster. You’ve got scars, you’re considered monstrous. Sad, the way that people are and certainly were back then as well.

Guillermo wanted a visible scar on the creature where Jesus, upon the crucifix, was stabbed. How’d he describe that detail to you?

The biggest answer is: Guillermo del Toro came up with that. But I think we all grew up with imagery of the crucifixion and subliminally know where those wounds are. There’s a symbolism that affects you, even if you don’t know why.

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Years ago, you actually made a Mary Shelley for Guillermo. She’s in an office, looking over the Frankenstein manuscript. What was it like to create a Mary Shelley?

It was difficult because we only had one clear painting of her. There are a few that exist, but there’s only one clear one, and she’s in her forties or something. But when she wrote Frankenstein, she was only 19 years of age, so I had to make this youthful version of her, which was tricky.

The one thing I did keep, which might not be true, is I kept these real heavy bags under her eyes, these dark circles that she had as a mature lady. I put ’em on her when she was 19, because a lot went wrong in her life. I think she was worn down, so I added those dark circles even as a teenager.

But yes, it was so surreal to actually be making Mary Shelley sit down writing the novel Frankenstein. And we decided to give her bare feet. She’s got her feet crossed. She got up in the middle of the night and decided she needed to write, and put her feet on a cushion on the floor. It’s a fantasy. Anything like that probably never happened, but it’s a nice image to think about.

What about the skin tones — the colors you wanted for The Creature? 

I wanted it based on alabaster statues and ivory. You sometimes get these red hues and blue hues in there and yellows. I wanted the creature to be colorful in that sense, but very subtle — almost pastel. It’s not in-your-face color, but it’s still vibrant enough to think, oh, this is like a butterfly.

As the movie goes on and he gets worn down, he gets a bit grungy-looking. His skin gets darker, almost a monotone until the final scene, or when his heart’s healed, I guess, and the sunlight hits him, and then the painting’s back to those nice subtle colors all over again. So he’s kind of back to his original self again.

What about the brutally cold winter environment? How did the cold affect his skin?

Well, the reason why I didn’t go too far with all the frostbite on him is he already proved that he self-heals. The frostbite wouldn’t happen. But the other detail to look out for on that makeup is: I put a yellow patch of flesh where his heart is, based on an old lock. I liked that imagery, so I put a yellow piece of goldy flesh there. If you look closely at the movie, it has a spot. On the edge of that particular piece of yellow flesh, I always put little trickles of dried blood. I figured that his heart was always bleeding.

Do you know the exact number of how many bodies it took Victor to create the creature?

I don’t know how many it took, but it wouldn’t take as many as you think, because we agreed that Frankenstein wouldn’t go and get a bunch of bad bodies and go, “Okay, I’ll use this head, I’ll use this leg.” He goes to the battlefield and he chooses the best ones that he likes.

So the main body is one person that he really liked, because he didn’t sew a head on. So he’s mainly one body, but we decided perhaps the hand was damaged from an explosion, so he had to replace the hand. Perhaps the foot was blown up below the knee, so he had to replace that. But that’s the only reason he replaced it, because the rest of the body was so perfect for what he wanted.

As someone who made monsters as a kid and looked up to the creature design in Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein, congratulations on a full-circle moment in your career and life. How good did it feel to make your own Frankenstein monster?

First of all, Jack, that was a really nice thing for you to say. Did it feel good? Yeah, it does feel really good. It’s very, very nice. When our call time was 10:00 p.m., you’re on set for 10, you’ve never been asleep, so you’ve got to get up and put on makeup for 10 hours, I would say to myself, “Look, if this wasn’t you and you heard the person who was complaining about how tired they were, you’d call them an idiot. So get out of bed and get that creature done.” I knew that it was an absolute honor, so I like the way you put that.

Any specific days on set, seeing Jacob bring the creature to life, that were pure wish-fulfillment moments?

One was when I first heard Jacob speak, because until then, he was just walking around as my sculpture. But as soon as he put the teeth in and I first heard him in the captain’s quarters, that was a heartfelt moment because the creature was now alive. It wasn’t a statue anymore; it brought this baby to life.

And then the second day I really liked was a scene at the end where the creature carries Elizabeth (Mia Goth) down all those steps. When I was there with this manor house in England, and all these people dressed in these beautiful ball gowns and tuxedos juxtaposed with this dead man with his face scarred, carrying this lady down, I thought it was a beautiful image. It hit me that we were doing Frankenstein then, because Frankenstein is all about the juxtaposition: the wealth and the creature.

Jacob did carry her down those steps several times, and that was 200 marble steps, and he’s carrying the lady. You’ve got the big furs on him and that full makeup, and he’s walking down them steps. We actually made a Mia dummy for him to carry, but we didn’t end up using it. He just carried Mia. The guy was a superstar.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives on Netflix globally on November 7th, 2025.