Jacob Elordi was “forced” by Guillermo Del Toro to read a book to nurture… the creature like a newborn baby! The transformation from innocence to raging fury of The Creature was more than just acting — every sound, every movement was meticulously crafted to an almost haunting level. He also revealed a deeply personal secret about this journey, one that changed Jacob forever…
Jacob Elordi still remembers the day Guillermo del Toro slid a worn copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein across the table and said, “You’re going to read this to him every night. Out loud. Like a bedtime story.” The “him” was the Creature Elordi would soon embody in del Toro’s upcoming reimagining.
At first, Elordi thought it was a quirky directorial ritual. He soon realised it was something far more intimate. Del Toro wanted the actor to raise the monster the way a parent raises a child: through voice, tone, and endless repetition. The Creature would literally learn the world through Jacob’s nightly readings.
For weeks, Elordi sat alone in his Mexico City apartment, reading the same passages again and again. He softened his naturally deep Australian baritone into something fragile, almost infantile. The Creature, in those early days of creation, had to sound newborn—curious, confused, heartbreakingly gentle.
Del Toro recorded every session. He would listen back and give notes the next morning: “More wonder. Less threat. He doesn’t know he’s a monster yet.” Elordi began to understand that the director wasn’t just shaping a performance—he was shaping a soul.
Then came the brutal pivot. Once the Creature experiences betrayal and pain, innocence must curdle into fury within a single film. Del Toro demanded the shift be audible in the voice itself. “We have to hear the child die,” he told Elordi, “and something ancient be born in its place.”
That was when the real training began. Elordi was instructed to abandon melody and embrace texture. Del Toro wanted the Creature’s rage to sound like “stones grinding together in a landslide.” The actor was given a strange daily regimen: vocal exercises built entirely around gravel, grit, and abrasion.
He started with simple growls over loose pebbles held in his mouth—yes, actual stones—spitting them out between takes to protect his teeth. The goal was to coat every syllable in the rasp of something dragged across riverbed rock for centuries.
Days turned into weeks. Elordi’s throat began to bleed. He woke up tasting iron. Vocal coaches warned him he was heading for permanent damage. Yet del Toro kept pushing: “Pain is the bridge. The Creature doesn’t speak English—he speaks suffering. You have to live in it.”
There were nights when Elordi could barely swallow. He iced his neck for hours, whispering lines that came out like torn paper. He considered quitting. In a moment of desperation, he called his mother in Australia, voice cracked and raw, and simply cried.
But something shifted. The more his throat hurt, the more the Creature’s voice found its centre. The rasp stopped sounding forced; it became inevitable. When Elordi finally roared on set—stones long discarded, pain now internal—the sound that tore out of him made the crew step back involuntarily.
Del Toro smiled for the first time in months. “There he is,” the director whispered. “There’s my boy, all grown up and ready to burn the world.”
In a recent interview, Elordi finally revealed the secret he had kept quiet for over a year. “People think the transformation was makeup and prosthetics,” he said, voice still carrying a faint permanent huskiness. “But the real monster was built in my throat.”
He described the “stone exercises” in detail: how he once collapsed after a twelve-hour session, convinced he had shredded his vocal cords for good. “I was spitting blood into the sink and thinking, ‘This is it. Career over at twenty-six.’”
Yet the next morning, when he tried to speak and only gravel came out, something clicked. That ruined voice was exactly what the Creature needed in his final, apocalyptic scenes. The damage wasn’t destruction—it was evolution.
Elordi now calls it the most terrifying and sacred experience of his life. “Guillermo forced me to give birth to something through my own body,” he says. “I raised it like a child with bedtime stories, then I had to watch it grow up and hate me.”
He still reads Frankenstein sometimes, late at night, but never aloud anymore. His throat remembers too well. The faint rasp that lingers is a souvenir—and a warning—of the price paid to turn a man into a myth.
And somewhere, in the darkness of a cutting room, del Toro keeps the raw recordings: a young actor whispering tenderly to a monster who isn’t there yet, night after night, until the monster finally whispers back in a voice made of broken stones and unbreakable grief.
