THE WASHINGTON POST: Jacob Elordi’s Venice transformation sparks Oscar buzz for Frankenstein role

There was a time in 2024 when it felt as if the firmament of Hollywood’s brightest young stars was completely set. Namely, if you weren’t in the cast of “Dune: Part Two,” or one of the many former nobodies from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” who’d since become somebodies, you weren’t it.

Jacob Elordi, the 6-foot-5 Australian who once felt as if he’d been in the same graduating class as Oscar-nominated rocket ships Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler, seemed to have been left behind.

He’d been a rising star with the Kissing Booth trilogy and Euphoria, and broke the zeitgeist in 2023 as the much-memed lust object of Saltburn. But he was a strange casting choice as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. His odd Vietnam War meditation, Oh, Canada, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Gere, went nowhere. On Swift Horses — a gay love story that showed at several festivals — was released with a thud in April.

But really, as enraptured audiences learned watching Saturday’s premiere of Guillermo del Toro’s lush, passionate Frankenstein. at the Venice Film Festival, he just needed time.

Suddenly, Elordi, 28, has become the hot topic among Oscar conversations here on the Lido.

He has gotten rave reviews for his physical, humanist portrayal as the creature Dr Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) builds from the stitched-together body parts of dead soldiers.

At the very least, he has certainly emerged from the festival as a Movie Star, judging from the screaming crowds and breathless social media posts documenting his every move on the Frankenstein carpet, including his oversized Bottega Veneta tuxedo and the moment he took flowers that a fan had given to him and immediately went to hand them to his mum.

Inside the theatre, the movie got a 13-minute standing ovation, the longest at the festival so far.

Elordi has always moved through Hollywood with awkward, independent-minded, transfer-kid energy — fitting for someone playing a creature who’s tortured by not knowing where in the world he fits in. Perhaps it’s an Aussie thing.

The youngest child from a working-class family from Brisbane, Elordi moved to Hollywood at 19 and quickly landed his lead part in The Kissing Booth.

But in the year between when it shot in 2017 and the night it dropped on Netflix in May 2018 (and he woke up the next morning to find out that he had 4 million Instagram followers), he was broke and living on a friend’s couch, and sometimes in his car, he told GQ in 2022.

With his visa about to expire, and ready to give up and move home, he had a last-chance audition and landed the part of alpha narcissist Nate on Euphoria. His subsequent eclectic career choices sometimes make it seem as if he’s trying to skip over being young Brando and go straight to whatever he was doing post-Apocalypse Now.

Perhaps that Euphoria” audition taught him something about the importance of seizing opportunities. Andrew Garfield was originally cast as the creature in “Frankenstein” but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts nine weeks before shooting.

Del Toro had been impressed with Elordi from Saltburn, and on Zoom they discussed their shared vision of the creature as an innocent who only later starts tearing a path of destruction once the world starts teaching him about violence and pain.

Del Toro quickly knew that he was going to cast Elordi, according to Variety. The actor’s eyes were “full of humanity.” The director called his other leading man, and, as Isaac told the outlet, “he was like, ‘I found him! The creature could be Jesus. But with Jacob, it’s Adam. He’s the first human, and it has that innocence.”

The 149-minute, $120 million movie is probably going to be Netflix’s big Oscar play. Del Toro became transfixed with the story when he was a “very Catholic” kid growing up in Mexico, he said at Saturday’s Venice news conference before the red carpet premiere.

His interpretation stays close to Mary Shelley’s 1818 book, and is framed around Dr Frankenstein and the creature telling their stories while locked in a standoff on a Danish ship stuck in ice in the Arctic. And del Toro has just been waiting for the right time, and the right budget, to actually make it. “Now I’m in postpartum depression,” he joked.

He’d also had a vision of the creature from an early age. Having watched many versions of the Frankenstein story, del Toro knew he didn’t want visible stitches or bolts coming out of the creature’s neck. Instead, del Toro wanted him to feel like a newborn, and he based the look on a marble statue, with the creature’s almost-translucent skin covered in lines where the pieces of flesh have been artfully stitched together.

Getting into makeup could take 10 hours. Elordi would sometimes have to show up at the makeup trailer at 10 p.m. to make his early-morning call time.

According to Variety, he’d practice the creature’s walk in front of his hotel mirror, and based it on the slow Japanese dance form butoh.

The creature’s voice is based on Mongolian throat singing, and Elordi got so used to grunting that, he told the trade, he actually started doing it in one of his first scenes playing Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights which he shot right afterward. (It comes out in February and co-stars Margot Robbie.)

In the Venice news conference, Elordi said he’d poured every part of himself into that role, starting from the moment he was born.

“In so many ways, the creature that’s on screen in this movie is the purest form of myself. He’s more me than I am,” he said.

Critics have noticed. Vulture called him the “soul” of the movie who made the creature’s awakening, “his growing curiosity and hurt, feel fresh, vital, new”.

The Hollywood Reporter called his performance “revelatory,” not just for “its expressive physicality but perhaps even more so for its innocence, its deep well of yearning and the crushing emptiness that follows as the Creature comes to understand who and what he is.”

Will Oscars come knocking? The reviews for “Frankenstein” as a whole have been generally but not universally favourable, and the Netflix of it all — the meager three-week theatrical run — may hurt it in eyes of the academy.

Will Elordi be going for lead actor, a category where young men rarely, if ever, win, or supporting actor, where he’d probably be accused of category fraud but would have a decent chance? L

ead would not be an easy road. It’s stacked with contenders, including Michael B. Jordan for Sinners, Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine (which will premiere at Venice on Monday), Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another and Jesse Plemons in Bugonia.

What we do know is that Elordi went into this movie as an actor with good parts and a lot of potential, and came out reborn as someone who might be on his way to becoming a great. And if that isn’t a bit of a Frankenstein gothic fairy tale, what is?