Guillermo Del Toro's 'Frankenstein': See What Doug Jones Would Have Looked Like As The Monster In The Film That Never Happened

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein movie, which never got made, is just one of many great "what if" Hollywood scenarios involving the cinephile director. He had been talking about making the movie as far back as 2008, but sadly, it never gained enough traction to get it to the starting line.

It did, however, get far enough that del Toro's frequent collaborator, actor Doug Jones, saw a bust of his own head as Frankenstein's monster, and in a recent interview, he describes what his version of the classic horror character would have looked like.

Speaking with Collider, Jones – who has played creatures in del Toro movies like from The Faun and the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth, Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, and the amphibian man in The Shape of Water – confirmed that del Toro did indeed want him to play Frankenstein's monster in his would-be film all those years ago, despite the fact that he doesn't have the giant build that you'd expect for someone playing the character:

"[M]y first thought is that I'm not the big, broad, big-boned lumbering Frankenstein that you have in mind. But it was told to me, Guillermo is a big fan of Bernie Wrightson, and a friend of Bernie Wrightson, and Bernie had illustrated a version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and all of the images of Frankenstein's monster in that, that's what he was going to pattern my look after. Which was more emaciated, little skinnier, little more drawn, little more pathetic looking. And yet, had an unnatural physical prowess, an unnatural athleticism to him. He was sewn together with spare parts of a couple different bodies. Very bony face, long, stringy, drawn hair."

Here's one of Wrightson's illustrations, which makes it really easy to imagine how Jones could have looked in character:

"I never went through a makeup test myself for it," Jones continued. "But I did go to the creature shop, Spectral Motion, who was developing the look for him at the time...I was in the creature shop for something else, and Mike Elizalde, the owner of the shop, said 'I gotta show you something.' Then he unveiled a head and shoulders bust of me with this monster makeup built on it. It was like, honestly, my eyes welled up. It was so hauntingly beautiful, and it did pay reverence to Bernie Wrightson's artwork and also gave you a different-looking Frankenstein monster than what you're used to."

Jones suspects that Universal's aborted Dark Universe, which was scrapped after the failure of Tom Cruise's The Mummy, could be the reason why del Toro's version never came to the big screen. The Dark Universe version of Frankenstein would have featured Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's monster, who was set to appear in another character's movie before getting his own solo film. Now that the studio is no longer worried about having that connective tissue between films, might we still one day see del Toro standing on a set for his Frankenstein project, screaming "It's alive! It's alive!"?

In the meantime, we may yet see Frankenstein and his horrific creation show up in a CBS procedural or maybe even a Blumhouse movie.