Guillermo del Toro says he has identified with the monster in Frankenstein ever since he first read Mary Shelley’s classic as a child. Speaking exclusively with Page Six at the 2025 Gotham Awards, the Oscar-winning director reflected on discovering the novel at age 11.
“I immediately knew the creature was me,” he recalled, explaining that he connected deeply with the monster’s loneliness and alienation.
Del Toro said his own childhood in the 1960s made the story especially personal. “I didn’t fit [into] what people thought I should be as a boy growing up in the 60s,” he shared.
Despite decades of acclaim, he noted that the feelings he had as a young outsider remain with him. “It’s about the inner signals aligning with the mainstream or not,” he said. “With what people think is proper or not. Or, what people think it should be or what you think it should be.”
Del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, along with Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in supporting roles. The story, originally published in 1818, follows a scientist who assembles a living being from body parts an enduring myth del Toro believes resonates across time.
“I think there are maybe ten stories from the vocabulary of myth collectively… and that’s one of them,” he said. He continued, “Pinocchio’s another, Sherlock Holmes… the literature of the world has given us many of these and every time you sing it with truth and power in your voice and conviction, they are renewed.”
Earlier in the evening, del Toro accepted a Gotham Award and reflected on how Shelley’s book shaped his sense of belonging. “I understood that back then, through her work and the first glimpse of Boris Karloff, that I did not belong in the world the way my parents, the way the world expected me to fit,” he said during his speech. “That my place was in a faraway land inhabited only by monsters and misfits,” he added. “They have been my kin ever since.”
Source: Page Six