New Vanity Fair feature about Frankenstein + photos
You can read the full article here, plus all the pics, but I’m including some Oscar specific excepts.
As Isaac gets to work making the body that del Toro describes as “a quilt,” the director urges him not to be delicate. “Bone surgery is a lot like carpentry,” del Toro explains. “They call it traumatology, because it causes such trauma. Somebody coming in with a box of tools.”
Isaac, clad in red gloves and a billowing stained shirt open to the navel, likes that. He smiles behind sweaty hair that dangles down over his face. “I think instead of calling myself an actor, I’m going to introduce myself as a traumatologist,” he says. Isaac plays the ethically challenged scientist as part surgeon, part mechanic.
The incessant laughter between him and Isaac lightens the mood on a gloomy story story about the hubris of trying to defy death rather than savoring the fleeting time we are given. “What’s interesting to me is that he’s not trying to keep me in some sort of dark evil zone. He basically directs in jokes to me,” Isaac says.
Del Toro, who’s from Mexico, often delivers these bleak gags in Spanish to Isaac, who was born in Guatemala. “It feels like I’m making something with a family member,” Isaac says. Speaking Spanish also kept them out of trouble. “A lot of the jokes aren’t translatable because they sound kind of awful when you’re telling them in English,” the actor admits.
Though the movie itself does not have a lighthearted tone, del Toro’s operatic approach gives it an over-the-top feeling that softens the blows. “There’s absurdity in the face of darkness, which is a very, very elemental trait of Latin America,” Isaac says. “There’s a nuance about how one approaches death and darkness that has a surreality to it.”
“In the Mary Shelley book, funnily enough, Victor had the sweetest stage-mom of a dad,” Isaac points out. “He followed him around, paid for everything, was such a big part of his life, writing him letters all the time, believing in him. And he still ended up being what he was.”
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