Hint: The actor is no stranger to latex
When director Guillermo Del Toro started talking about his take on Frankenstein for the first time, as far back as last October (here, this writer immediately envisioned Hellboy star Ron Perlman. Silly me for thinking of the obvious choice, apparently, but I still can’t help but think of a hulking, lumbering creation.
On the red carpet at the premiere of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Del Toro posits an unconventional alternative. “For the monster I would love to have Doug Jones,” he revealed. Jones has worked for the director as a creature performance since Mimic and plays Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films. “I think he can do a fantastic job. Ron looks seven feet tall in Hellboy, but he’s not. I think we could do that with Doug, but I would love to do it with him. The only vision of the Frankenstein monster I’ve ever latched onto is Berni Wrightson’s. He’s lanky and long and it’s gorgeous in a tragic way. Doug has all of those qualities.”
Later, I caught up to Jones and revealed the good news, “You’ve just made my day! I never knew that!” Jones expressed with his jaw on the floor. That said, who’s performance of the monster has he admired the most? “Boris Karloff, no question. I respect that man so much. Every time his name is brought up in the same sentence as mine, I’m honored and I don’t want to belittle his name with mine.”
Del Toro is in the early stages of prepping two Hobbit films for executive producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, an endeavor that will require him to put Frankenstein on the backburner for now. “I think it’s going to have to be developed very carefully over the next four years,” he chuckles. “Look, I would never attempt to recreate the Whale Frankenstein, but I do think there is an alternate story that could be told about the Frankenstein mythos.” Like? “It’s more like a fairy tale, a strange, weird fairy tale.”
Asked who his ideal Victor Frankenstein would be, Del Toro simply smiled and said, “I won’t say anything ’cause then you would know what I’m doing.”
The director says he’s been bouncing back and forth to London lately for the Hobbit films. There are no scripts yet, however, “We already started notes and underlining and e-mailing back and forth. A few lines have been written here and there, but we will have the big pow-wow [soon] – bad pizza, take-out food in a sort’ve a pressure cooker [meeting] in about two weeks.”
Source: Ryan Rotten
