His 1.96 height, the same one that brought him more than one no when he was making his way as an actor, will now turn him into a towering Frankenstein’s monster. Jacob Elordi, who rose to fame in 2019 for the role of Nate Jacobs in the Euphoria series, will bring to life the creature that Mary Shelley imagined in her 1818 novel and that has been brought to film so many times. Now it will be the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who is already preparing his own version for Netflix.
Elordi, 26, has joined the project replacing Andrew Garfield, who was originally slated to play the squire and who left the film due to scheduling issues. Oscar Isaac ( Caballero Luna , Secretos de un matrimonio ) will play Dr. Frankenstein.
In the minds of the most cinephiles there will forever be Boris Karloff, who played the monster in the version that James Whale brought to the cinema in 1931 and subsequently on two other occasions. But it was Charles Ogle who was the first actor to step into the shoes of the creature. It was in 1910 in a 14-minute short called Frankenstein, which was the first screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s work. More recently, other artists have taken on this role; it is the case of Christopher Lee, Robert De Niro or Bela Lugosi.
For Jacob Elordi it will be quite a challenge to transform into a monster, since the actor is quite a sex symbol of his generation. After his role as a bad boy in the series Euphoria, he has been choosing his projects wisely: in 2022 he shared a poster with Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas in the thriller Aguas profundas; he has starred in one of the films of the moment, Saltburn, by Emerald Fennell, and is about to premiere in Spain Priscilla, by Sofia Coppola, in which he gives life to Elvis Presley. Soon he will also be the protagonist of Oh Canada, the new work of the director Paul Schrader, with Richard Gere and Uma Thurman.
This young Australian of Basque origins (his grandfather was from Algorta and emigrated when Elordi’s father was only eight years old) was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Brisbane. He has three older sisters. As a child, he already dreamed of being an actor, which is why he started attending acting classes. At just 11 years old, he made his stage debut with a musical. Ready to make a career as an actor, he moved to Hollywood. His first role on the big screen was as an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge. I was 19 years old. His media explosion came in 2018, when he starred, at the age of 21, in the first film of the teenage Netflix trilogy My First Kiss. From there to Euphoria. It was then that his name began to settle in the heart press for his relationships: first, with his co-star, Zendaya; later, with the model Kaia Gerber, and currently, with Olivia Jade Giannulli, daughter of the actress Lori Loughlin.
Already a star, Elordi can’t quite believe his success. He confesses that he even thought about leaving it all when fame suddenly bewildered him. “Every day I feel that I shouldn’t be here. That I am an impostor”, he has explained on occasion.
