In this review, writer Rory Doherty explores Jacob Elordi's track record of playing monsters and how his role in the new film Frankenstein contributes to that legacy.
Guillermo Del Toro says he cast Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s Monster because of his eyes: that piercing, vulnerable stare we’ve seen over the years on screen used as a tool of intoxication and control against the people under their spell — or in their way.
It’s that history, and that gaze, that make his performance as the monster in Frankenstein, which recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival, so exciting. Elordi has spent the last six years playing different variations of monsters. In Euphoria, Saltburn, and Priscilla, his characters are deeply charismatic and capable of deep cruelty. In Frankenstein, this track record is turned on its head – Elordi’s Monster appears cruel and wretched to bystanders, and only a select few get close enough to realize how sensitive, empathetic, and kind he is trying to be. The dynamic between the appeal of his outward aura and his true human nature has been inverted — and Elordi’s talents have almost been reborn.
Del Toro has spent his career in the company of creatures and demons – the designs and performances of Hellboy, Pan, and the amphibian “asset” of The Shape of Water are a centerpiece collage of craft, humanity, and heart-on-your-sleeve emotion. So, when the Mexican director finally started mounting his long-gestating and Netflix-funded adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at Netflix, how he cast the Monster — the living thing created from dead tissue and corpses by the egotistical Victor Frankenstein — would make or break his ambitions.
The part initially went to Andrew Garfield, but after he dropped out del Toro landed on a much younger (and taller) alternative – Elordi. The Australian heartthrob is about the same age as anatomical scientist Victor Frankenstein was in Shelley’s book (here, the headstrong Victor is played by Oscar Isaac), but youth is on Elordi’s side. Del Toro’s Monster starts as an awkward but sensitive child who is soon punished for being curious about the world. Elordi’s lumbering, groaning performance is his best yet, acting like a life-giving bolt of electricity right down the middle of del Toro’s film, hitting the familiar thematic stomping ground of “man is the real monster” with precision and weight.
Elordi stands well over six feet and boasts brooding, chiseled good looks. The toxic men he plays are aware of the effect they have on their admirers: Nate has a pathological drive to bend his high school peers to his will; the intensity of Elvis’s gaze convinces Priscilla to preserve herself as an object of feminine innocence. While Felix is largely ignorant of the extent of Saltburn’s nastiness, the casualness with which he withdraws his friendship and reminds his devotees — both Oliver and the inner circle Farleigh — of how generous he is to them underlines the tension to his upper class benevolence.
Elordi’s Monster, by contrast, is defined by rejection and discovery. After being born (or resurrected?) in Frankenstein’s industrial laboratory, the creature’s strangeness is on full display. His clean, cauterized scars across pallid, white marble skin conjure images of the Engineers in Prometheus or, less favorably, the first on-screen Deadpool. Once the initial high of a successful experiment wears off, Frankenstein is filled with doubt and suspicion. He chains the Monster up in the lab’s sewers and tries to teach it language, but the only word the Monster utters in front of him is “Victor” — making Frankenstein fear that this God-defying achievement has only been in service of his own ego.
The Monster is dramatically cast aside, and as he forages through the wilderness, he speedruns a difficult lesson in humanity – if one sees the world as full of enemies, then violence is inevitable. Elordi’s height feels more huge and looming because the Monster is never sure-footed or nimble — as the Monster gains confidence in his physicality, his sensitivity grows too. This is what makes the repulsion he encounters so painful. The Monster is being rejected and abandoned at the exact same time as he is embracing the unknown. His strange, sincere humanity — which Elordi evokes with a sort of primal but sensitive grace — is rewarded with prejudice and violence.
The crucial difference between Elordi’s character in Frankenstein and his close-minded, immature ones in Euphoria and Saltburn is how socialized the latter are. Nate, Felix, and Elvis are the products of hierarchies that value and venerate them; every move they make, whether aloof or calculated, feeds into their image of generous, comfortable masculinity.
But there's such an emotional clarity to Elordi's Monster, whereas Nate, Elvis, and Felix feel more opaque and unreachable. Before now, Elordi has excelled playing people willingly keeping themselves at a distance. With Frankenstein, he has nowhere to hide. We are allowed into every shade of the Monster’s big, booming temperament.
Elordi in Frankenstein demonstrates the clear difference between a territorial, self-obsessed narcissism and a messy, still-developing self-awareness; by moving so dramatically from one to the other, Elordi shatters his early type-casting mold. In the second half of Frankenstein, the Monster tells his story from his point of view, explaining to his creator a compressed, unorthodox coming-of-age story where he hid in an alpine cottage and learned from a shepherd family the milk of human kindness and the merits of literature.
The Monster chases tenderness, quickly and naturally growing into someone aware of what it means to be shunned and rejected — a type of self-interrogation that sociopathic alphas like Nate Jacob are not capable of entertaining. Over the course of Euphoria’s two seasons, Elordi’s iconic character is defined by his tightness, simmering with aggression and playing off the low self-esteem of his (usually female) peers. His masculinity is almost parodically rigid, and even more expressive and flamboyant characters like Elvis and Felix (the latter being the subject of Oliver’s volatile queer obsession) stay within established heteronormative boundaries.
But as something considered “unnatural,” the Monster inherits no socially enforced masculinity, and Elordi’s performance has the loose, arrhythmic energy of someone trying to figure out how to stand, walk, and talk in a way that suits their utterly unique body. Unlike the unsympathetic monster Elordi has played before, the Monster hasn’t figured out how to look at someone to make them feel desired, worthless, or terrified.
In a career-changing twist, Elordi has to play someone subjected to an unflinching and resentful gaze. The actor ably plays beautiful, masculine men who exploit how admired they are, but a common thread of arrested development runs through the greatest hits of his performances. Only by playing a character desperate to understand their identity and change their status can he offer us something startlingly, movingly new.
