Eh up, it’s alive! Australian actor Jacob Elordi is playing Frankenstein’s monster as no one has ever imagined him before… with a Yorkshire accent.
The actor, who is 28 and one of the most desirable men in the world, said yesterday that he had, indeed, decided to ‘go Yorkshire’ for his portrayal of ‘the creature’ in Guillermo del Toro‘s forthcoming film.
‘Yes, the accent is Yorkshire – that’s a great spot,’ said Elordi. ‘David Bradley who plays the blind man in the film is from that part of the world, and when the creature starts to speak he learns from the blind man. So there are bits and bobs of Yorkshire in the way he speaks.’
Elordi spends much of the film naked aside from a pair of hotpants made from yellow bandages, and his performance in the film will be a further staging post on his march to global stardom.
He rose to fame with the TV series Euphoria and further cemented his heartthrob status starring in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and then as Elvis in Priscilla.
He is in the conversation when it comes to actors who might slip into Daniel Craig‘s loafers as James Bond, although Amazon will not start casting until they have a script, which is likely a month or two away still.
The actor recently broke up from girlfriend Olivia Jade and is in Venice with his mother, Melissa, who he brought to a party hosted by the jewellers Cartier and the film magazine A Rabbit’s Foot at the Gritti Palace on Friday night.
He wore a $20,000 Cartier Juste en Clou necklace to that event and yesterday wore gold earrings, rings and layered gold necklaces for promotional duties ahead of the world premiere of the Netflix film, in competition, at the Venice Film Festival.
Australian actor Jacob Elordi (pictured) is playing Frankenstein’s monster as no one has ever imagined him before… with a Yorkshire accent
Elordi spends much of the film naked aside from a pair of hotpants made from yellow bandages. Pictured: Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster in a rare covered-up moment
British actor Andrew Garfield had signed up to play the role but dropped out at the last minute due to scheduling issues.
Del Toro approached Elordi just nine weeks before the cameras started rolling.
Elordi said: ‘I was finishing The Narrow Road To The Deep North so I had about three or four weeks only before we started. It presented itself as a monumental task but as Guillermo said the banquet was already there and everyone was already eating.’
He added: ‘I was drawn to this role because it’s a vessel that I could put every part of myself into.
‘Everything from the moment I was born to being with you here today, that’s all in it in many ways. The creature on screen is the purest form of myself. He is more me than I am as a performer. If you can find yourself in a character that’s a really beautiful thing that can happen, and I am only realising it now in hindsight.’
The streamer has yet to win a Best Picture Oscar and this film, alongside the George Clooney drama Jay Kelly and Katherine Bigelow’s nuclear missile thriller A House of Dynamite, are their great hopes.
Director Del Toro said that this was the film that he had been waiting to make since he was seven years old.
The actor recently broke up from girlfriend Olivia Jade and is in Venice with his mother, Melissa
He said: ‘It is a dream for me and the (1931) film was a religion. I was raised very Catholic and Boris Karloff on the screen was a saint. I had to wait to get the scope to make it at a scale, so that you could reconstruct the whole world and I got that. Now I am in post-partum depression.’
The appearance of the creature is a long way from the Karloff creature with green skin and a bold through his neck. Elordi’s creature has pale blue skin and is almost veined with scars.
Del Toro said: ‘I wanted the creature to be new born. A lot of the creatures you see in Frankenstein films are like accident victims. I wanted beauty, a lot of alabaster and ivory. I also said no stitches.
‘Victor Frankenstein is an artist so after 20 years he would have created beautifully without leaving stitches.’ He added: ‘We based the head on the phrenology diagrams and on the body we were doing the lines like you streamline a car, with beauty. If you ask why didn’t Victor take half and half the answer is the war – everything is fed from spare pieces.’
The film will have a limited release in cinemas before becoming available to Netflix viewers. Del Toro said that he was having a ‘very fluid dialogue’ with Netflix over how long it might spend in theatres.
He said: ‘What I do know is if you can reach over 300 million viewers then you take the opportunity and the challenge to tell the story,’
