WHAT THE (MAD) DOCTOR ORDERED

Jacob Elordi makes a creative leap in Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein'

- CARLOS AGUILAR

"PLAYING this was an exploration into a cave of the self, into every experience," actor Jacob Elordi said of his role as the Creature in the Netflix film "Frankenstein."

BEXX FRANCOIS For The Times

A curse befell Jacob Elordi when he was a child. It happened in the aisle of a Blockbuster Video. The culprit for the incantation was the image of the now emblematic Pale Man from "Pan's Labyrinth," flaunting eyes on his palms on the back cover of the DVD.

“My mother remembers this,” an energetic Elordi tells me in a Hollywood conference room. “I came running through the corridor and I was like, ‘I need this DVD.’ And she was like, ‘That's so much blood and gore. You can't watch it.’

“She told you, ‘I'll get it if you promise never to work with that director,’” Guillermo del Toro, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning dark fantasy, chimes in, sitting next to Elordi.

His wish granted, Elordi watched “Pan's Labyrinth” at a young age. The fable set against the Spanish Civil War forever changed him. “From that moment, because of the way that Guillermo wills magic into the world and into his life, I feel like there was some kind of curse set upon me,” the actor says. “I do genuinely believe that, as out there as it sounds.”

Now, Elordi, 28, has become one of the Mexican director's monsters in his long-gestating adaptation of Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein” (now in theaters, then on Netflix starting Nov. 7). Under intricate prosthetics and makeup, Elordi plays the Creature that arrogant scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) breathes life into an assemblage of dead limbs and organs imbued with a new consciousness.