Netflix’s Frankenstein, one of the buzziest titles leading into the Toronto International Film Festival this year, thrilled audiences at its premiere Monday night at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
The TIFF premiere featured a Q&A with the cast and director night, where star Jacob Elordi and director Guillermo del Toro spoke about the humanity of Frankenstein’s Creature during the TIFF premiere of del Toro’s Frankenstein. During the Q&A, Elordi called playing the Creature with del Toro’s guidance and prosthetic makeup effects artist Mike Hill “everything.”
“I couldn’t possibly play the character without that,” he said. “Guillermo had described it to me when we first spoke. He said I needed to take a sacrament, and it needed to be biblical, and it needed to be resolved. So from the moment I sat in the chair with them in the morning [for makeup], that kind of 10-hour process was what was necessary to be able to sort of step into that world. It would be impossible without the work of Mike Hill.”
The biblical story that Del Toro says the Creature is reminiscent of
Del Toro also added that the Creature is reminiscent of the biblical story about the tree of knowledge and the erasure of innocence.
“I think that it is…clearly in the journey that we exist in a state of innocence,” he said. I mean, the biting of the apple [from] the tree of knowledge is when we recognize our condition. [It] is when we start feeling the world as a place that [could be] welcoming or horrible. And eventually, after 50, you realize it’s both. You realize that that’s the way it is.”
He also brought up the biblical story of Job and its focus on resilience amid adversity.
“The Book of Job…is the most mysterious, beautiful books in the Bible. And it’s exactly that question. Why do good things happen to bad things happen to good people?” he said. “And the answer God gives is basically, ‘That’s the way it is. Ultimately, that’s what we have to make peace [with]. The world is at the same time a horrible, marvelous place. And that’s the journey. The journey is every man’s journey. Every person’s journey.”
The Creature’s innocence should bring out the empathy in the audience, an emotion Del Toro feels everyone should feel more of nowadays.
“I think emotion is the new punk emotion. We are afraid of showing it. We’re afraid of seeing,” he said. “We are afraid of seeing emotion. We are in such a state of separation between us and within ourselves. That emotion seems ridiculously big, and that is the only thing that’s gonna save us, to have empathy and emotion.”
Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac as Dr. Victor Frankstein, who creates a new creature (Elordi) from human bodies. His revulsion at his own creation leads him to abandoning the Creature, who has to learn about life on his own and later comes back to seek answers from his creator.
When is ‘Frankenstein’ on Netflix and in theaters?
Based on the novel by Mary Shelley, the film also stars Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Burn Gorman, Ralph Ineson, Charles Dance, Lars Mikkelsen and Christian Convery.
The film comes to select theaters Oct. 17 and to Netflix Nov. 7.
