Playing in select theaters from 17th October before its debut on Netflix on 7th November, director Guillermo del Toro brings us Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elori as the creature, Star Wars: Starfighter star Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza and Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, and speaking with EW Isaac discusses his take on the character in a film featuring visual effects by ILM that looks set to garner great interest.
In del Toro’s version of the story, Victor’s relationship with his father (played by Charles Dance) is different from that of Shelley’s and some of those adaptations; rather than a “very kind, doting father,” Isaac explains, “in our film, he’s not that way: “He has a very domineering father that’s quite abusive but that expects so much of him. And in fact, somebody that Victor blames for the death of his beloved mother.”
Also, unlike the book, where Victor doesn’t dare recount how he created the monster “so as to not send other people foolishly seeking to do the same thing,” Isaac reminds, del Toro doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Part surgeon, part mechanic — as seen sawing away at a leg in EW’s exclusive Fall Movie Preview image, above — days spent filming in Victor’s lab were some of the actor’s favorite.
“The whole time we were in the lab, my alarm would go off at 4 a.m. sometimes, and I’m just jumping out of bed ready to get to work ’cause it was a banquet. And that one, it’s quite specifically a meat banquet,” he says. “There are these huge blocks of actual ice that you’d have all these [prosthetic] limbs on and blood everywhere.”
What might turn one actor’s stomach, though, didn’t bother Isaac. “The irony is, my father is a doctor and even visited set at one point. So I have that interest in the marvel of the human body built in.”
