The man behind Jacob Elordi’s transformation into the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein had braced himself for the relationship to turn sour.
It never did, and on Sunday night, their 400 hours of shared suffering paid off with an Oscar.
Frankenstein took home the award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the 98th Academy Awards on 15 March, with makeup and prosthetics artist Mike Hill accepting the prize at the Dolby Theatre.
Speaking to the press backstage, Hill opened up about what the process actually involved, and just how much he had asked of his leading man.
The numbers are staggering.
Elordi, 28, spent ten hours a day in the makeup chair, or rather, not in the chair. Hill’s colleague Jordan Samuel was keen to set the record straight on that point.
“That was 10 hours in makeup, but you need to understand, for four or five of those hours, Jacob stood like this and had the makeup applied. He was not sitting in a chair and relaxing,” Samuel said.
“They’d been there since like midnight, in some cases, and we would come in at six or seven in the morning to start putting the regular cast through.”
In total, Elordi endured the process 56 times across the shoot. Hill had gone into it expecting tension.
“When I first met Jacob, I said, ‘Look, you’re going to hate me at 2:00 a.m. and I’m going to hate you for hating me, but we’ve got a movie to do,'” he recalled.
What happened instead surprised him.
“We didn’t hate. He’s the nicest man on the planet. The most patient man on the planet. Ten hours a day, 56 times, and the man didn’t complain even once. And now we’re good mates.”
That account is consistent with what director del Toro has said about the Euphoria star’s commitment. “Never once did he come to me and complain,” del Toro has said. “Never once did he come to me and say, ‘I’m tired. I’m hungry. Can I go?’ And he put in 20-hour days.”
As for the creative vision behind the Creature itself, Hill was clear that he approached it with fresh eyes, deliberately avoiding past interpretations and starting from scratch.
