Oscar Isaac has spoken to EW.com about his take on Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein for Netflix, admitting it wasn’t on his “characters I’d like to play one day” wish list.
When the actor first met with Guillermo del Toro a couple years ago, he didn’t know the Oscar-winning filmmaker was about to embark on directing his take of the classic monster story, much less that he was looking for someone to play the infamous doctor.
“I didn’t find out until the end of a two-hour sit-down,” Isaac recalls, laughing as he chats with Entertainment Weekly while sitting outside a shop on a busy New York City street. “He said, ‘I think you have to be my Victor.’ And I said, ‘What now?’”
What sold del Toro? Their conversation was not about the character but about fathers.
“When we first find [Victor], he is this ragged man at the end of the Arctic. He is terrified. He is running. You don’t know if he’s running away or running through something or what’s going on,” Isaac explains. “As Victor tells his tale, he begins with his father and his own creation. ‘How was I created? How was this person created? And if I’m gonna tell you about this horrible secret that I have, I must tell you how it got there. And that’s with my own father.’” So when Guillermo and I first met, that’s what we mostly talked about. We didn’t even talk about Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein superfan del Toro — “You know, he has a house dedicated to Frankenstein,” Isaac says, clearly in awe of the filmmaker’s love of the Mary Shelley creation — has long wanted to make his Frankenstein, playing in select theaters Oct. 17 before its Netflix debut on Nov. 7.
“He’s lived with this for 30 years. It’s his bible,” Isaac says. “And yet, he has somehow believed [so much] in that love that he’s letting it tell him what to do; he’s not controlling it.”
The character has been portrayed dozens of times on screens big and small, even in video games, by the likes of Colin Clive (though named Henry, in 1931’s Frankenstein and 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein), Kenneth Branagh (1994’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), James McAvoy (2015’s Victor Frankenstein), and Harry Treadaway (Showtime’s 2014 series Penny Dreadful), among several others.
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, 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.”
But Victor isn’t all science and medicine. Isaac says del Toro provided him with another key ingredient for bringing Victor to life: a “crazed artist,” specifically a musician.
“That really sent us, and also Kate Hawley, the incredible costume designer, looking at references from the late-’60s and ’70s — Jimi Hendrix and Prince, watching the way Prince moves around the stage,” he says. “When Victor goes into the lab for the first time, he is looking at it like a concert hall, and he is saying, ‘Where do I want my singers? Where do I want the pyrotechnics? Where is all this gonna be?’ So that was a really fun energy. Guillermo [said], ‘This guy’s a rock star. He is the rock star of the moment,’ because at the moment, what everyone’s psyched about is these new incredible discoveries in science, and he’s at the frontier of that. There’s like a euphoria around that.”
But Victor’s quest to defy death — and in the process, have “dominion over the forces of his father” — takes a toll. Over the course of a couple years, audiences will see him go through “an entire arc of a human life,” Isaac says. “When we see him at the end, he looks like a battered old man.”
Read the article in full here. Frankenstein will get an exclusive three-week theatrical release starting on October 17th, before debuting it on Netflix on November 7th.
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