Director Guillermo del Toro has been spending this year working on one of his dream projects, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein that is set up at the Netflix streaming service. At one point, Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man) was in the cast, but he had to drop out and was replaced by Jacob Elordi (Saltburn)… and it has been said that the role Garfield had passed over to Elordi was the Monster. Now, Garfield has confirmed that it was the role of “the Creature” that he missed out on – and while he’s disappointed that he missed out on the experience, he’s glad Elordi got to have it in his place.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is a long-awaited passion project for the filmmaker, might have the following logline: Set in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century, the story of Dr. Pretorius, who needs to track down Frankenstein’s monster- who is believed to have died in a fire forty years before–in order to continue the experiments of Dr. Frankenstein.
Elordi’s co-stars include Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight), Mia Goth (Pearl), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), with Ralph Ineson (The Witch) showing up for a pivotal cameo.
Speaking with Deadline Hollywood (with thanks to Total Film for the transcription), Garfield said, “I was just with Jacob Elordi, who ended up playing the character of The Creature, in Marrakech, so I was hearing about how amazing and satisfying that was for him. So I’m very, very glad that it was him doing it. I’m, of course, disappointed that I didn’t get to do it because I love Guillermo and I love Oscar and everyone that he assembled. But meeting Jacob felt really serendipitous so that I could really see and hear that, ‘No, maybe he needed that experience more than me.’ That was cool, to feel that he had a really spectacular time on that job.“
Del Toro has been talking about making a new version of Frankenstein for more than a decade. Years ago, he had the project set up at Universal, with Doug Jones (The Shape of Water) on board to play Frankenstein’s Monster. The movie got far enough into pre-production that Jones even saw a bust of the Monster that was inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s artwork in an illustrated adaptation of Shelley’s novel that Wrightson spent seven years working on. But then the project fell apart. Now it’s finally happening at the Netflix streaming service, which previously teamed with del Toro on Pinocchio and the anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Are you looking forward to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein? What do you think of Jacob Elordi playing the Monster / Creature instead of Andrew Garfield? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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