Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein only hit the 2025 movie schedule a few weeks ago, but the reaction has been loud, and for some, this might be one of the filmmaker’s best movies yet. The book-to-screen adaptation, now streaming on Netflix, has quickly turned into the monster-movie conversation of the season, and for many viewers, Jacob Elordi’s performance as the Creature is the film’s emotional center of gravity. But if you can believe it, the actor claims he landed the role because of a “rude” tweet a few years ago.
Now that the Euphoria star has brought the role alive, an old story about how he ended up in the film has resurfaced—and it’s even better knowing how things turned out. Thanks to a TikTok posted by user @peytoninc, recorded during a post-screening Q&A with Del Toro, Elordi, and Oscar Isaac, fans finally heard the actor explain exactly how he “inserted” himself into the movie long before he was cast. And yes, it all started with one very rude tweet. As he tells it:
I quite arrogantly inserted myself into this movie years before. I had read when I made my first movie, The Kissing Booth…I was reading tweets about myself, because I’m insane and an actor. And one of the tweets said, ‘This plank of wood is so boring he could play nothing but Frankenstein’s creature.’ I never forgot that, and I remember reading it. I was like 22, and I was like ‘That’s a great idea.’
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. Hearing this now, after seeing Elordi’s deeply physical, almost mythic turn as the Creature, makes the story feel like fate. And ironically, Frankenstein is precisely the kind of film that proves why the young actor may be entering his strongest era yet. Critics and fans alike have noted that Del Toro’s approach reframes Mary Shelley’s novel as a mournful, operatic tragedy, and the Kissing Booth actor’s performance is a major reason the adaptation resonates the way it does.
It’s also fitting that a throwaway insult would spark something bigger for an actor starring in a Guillermo del Toro film. As Frankenstein viewers have already pointed out, del Toro’s monsters are never just monsters, because they’re almost always metaphors, or stand-ins for reflections, and often the most sympathetic figures in the story. The Creature, in this new adaptation, feels “real” in a way audiences haven’t seen before. He may be a patchwork of beautiful and broken parts, but he’s navigating the horror of being alive much like we all are. What’s more human than that?
It also explains why some viewers who initially side-eyed the casting (especially those who grew up with Andrew Garfield’s long-rumored version of the film) have come around. As one writer recently argued, Frankenstein might genuinely be del Toro’s best movie, and not because it’s the flashiest or the most prestigious, but because it distills everything he does well: gothic romance, tragic horror, compassion for the grotesque, and a deep devotion to Mary Shelley’s original text.
Many viewers who were initially skeptical of Jacob Elordi’s casting have largely come around. I know I have. Now that Frankenstein has had a few weeks to seep into the cultural bloodstream, stories like the Australian star’s only make the film feel richer. A throwaway insult turning into a career-defining role isn’t just poetic, but is an unmistakably 2020s twist on a 19th-century classic.
Viewers can check out Frankenstein, now streaming with a Netflix subscription.
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