Prosthetics Master Mike Hill on the Glamorous Gore In Frankenstein

0:07 Welcome to Look Behind the Look, the celebrated podcast that explores your favorite looks in film, television and fashion history. Through conversations with the fashion world's elite and award winning hair, makeup and costume designers on sets around the world, you will see and hear exciting tales from behind the scenes, career origin stories and tons of advice and tips. I'm your host, Tiffany Bartok. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Look Behind the Look. This week's episode is about the one everyone's talking about, Mike Hill. He is the man behind the monster in Frankenstein. And we are talking about how he has the ability to make the gory absolutely gorgeous.

0:48 You like that? This Frankenstein that we're all watching is less of a monster story and more of a romance, actually. It's a very beautiful film that everyone loves. Universally, if you had the chance to see it in the theater, you get a gold star. It is exceptional in the theater, and I hope they do a re-release around the holidays, but these are high hopes, I realize. Mike is a special effects artist, obviously. He's a makeup artist, a sculptor, and he specializes in horror, monster, and comic book superhero niches. He's a longtime collaborator of Guillermo del Toro's, and we talk all about it, how they work together. It's truly magical. And how he worked with Jacob Elordi, who gives the performance of a lifetime in this film.

1:32 Everybody really does. Everybody really showed up in this film. And I want to hear all about what you loved about it, too, after you hear this episode here. You may have heard a lot about Mike's process for this film, but I'm sure you'll hear something that you haven't already because I was so nervous, you guys. Super nervous for this interview. It doesn't happen very often. I get really excited, for sure. That's my problem. But I was completely starstruck. I don't know what happened. Well, I mean, I know what happened, obviously, because I ask some questions that are kind of maybe obvious, but... but maybe they aren't to you. So we shall see if you enjoy this talk.

2:12 I hope you do. Hi, I'm here with Mike Hill, and we are talking about all things Frankenstein today. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for joining me. Well, thank you for having me, Tiffany. It's an honor. The honor's mine. I call Cleona Fury a friend, and she has been saying, I can't wait till you talk to Mike about the movie. And I'm so excited to dive in it with you. It was such a beautiful film, as you know, obviously. But I just want to talk to you first off about mainly creating this from scratch and approaching it from the beginning.

2:53 Was it called a new Frankenstein, a reimagining when you and Guillermo were talking about the film? Yeah. Yeah, that's a really broad question. Yeah. Yes. Well, of course, yeah, we didn't want to, you know, emulate anything anybody else had done before us. Yep. You know, this was Guillermo's version of Mary Shelley's work. So we obviously had initial meetings. And what I always tell people is, Tiffany, that... Guillermo del Toro is very good at telling me what he doesn't want. You know, it's a really good process to work like that, Tiffany, because it eliminates me wasting time, you know, basically designing something he doesn't want.

3:33 So if he tells me what he doesn't want, and then he's very good at empowering the artist and letting you do your thing. And then he'll say yay or nay or he'll step in and make some obviously wonderful suggestions. So it's a good way that we work. We have like a telepathically linked somehow. We normally agree on most stuff, you know, and any stuff we don't agree on, he's the boss, so he's always right. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. There is a real similarity between this creature and the shape of water for me. I don't know if there are qualities that he and you sort of agree on about creatures in general. You know, they sort of are this beautiful, well, Nightmare Alley too, you know, this beauty in the grotesque.

4:16 I wonder what that comes from. I wonder what influences you on creating these creatures that makes it so beautiful. Well, they were never intended to be alike in any way. But I've seen people like yourself, you know, bring that up. And it's very obvious. It's a creature having some kind of relationship with a human woman, you know. So the similarities are there. The difference is with The Ship of Water, Kimo's direction was to make it handsome. Oh. To make it like a leading man. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, you know, because he wanted it. He was very obsessed with what size the butt is to be attractive.

4:56 Yeah, but on the Frankenstein creature, it didn't go like that. But he did tell me he didn't want it to be repulsive in any way. A lot of, if I may say, a lot of other versions of Frankenstein's monster creature are, you know, distracting to look at. And we knew that when Guillermo's script, it couldn't be that way. You know, just the admiration that Elizabeth has for him wouldn't work if he was as grotesque as it could be made out and unpleasant to look at. We also decided that on this one is that the creature should look brand new, like he'd just been, you know, newly minted.

5:37 A lot of them look like car accidents that might have been sewn up and repaired. Well, he had to look like, no, somebody designed this. Someone very cleverly made a pattern or a template and all these geometric shapes to show that Frankenstein in this version was an artist first and foremost above being a scientist. He was an artist too, and that's portrayed for his clothing and his attire and the way he holds himself in the movie. You can see that he is almost very thespian, and we think the creature had to fall in line with that. So it was a lot of parameters that made me come up with the design. First of all, I was very insistent on making the thing look... like it stepped out of the 1800s. Specifically? Yeah, I wasn't trying to impress with the extravagantness of modern-day techniques we could use to make a fabulous creature.

6:19 It had to look like it was Finchard at that period, and that had to make, you know, keeping things tighter, and that's what we had to do. And then I feel that, to finish off your question, the similarity between these two creatures, I feel that that wasn't my fault, that was Jacob Elodie's fault. Because the face, I designed a face that was to be pleasant and to not be ugly, but I wasn't planning, I didn't try to make him attractive in any way. Oh, that's so, yes. I see what you're saying. Impossible. No, exactly. And again, with Jacob, let's make it clear, it isn't just his features and his good looks that shine through.

7:01 It's his heart and his soul and his persona. Truly, yeah. So that came from these ugly cheapos and these distracting scars and this, you know, that came from Jacob's soul that brought it through. So the culmination of the makeup design And Jacob's soul as well as performance, you know, made it this creature and I guess made it attractive to some people. Yeah, I know. Yeah, many people. I know, right? Quite a lot. The hottest day. I can't believe the response, to be honest with you, you know, but I love it. Of course. It's fantastic and very flattering. Of course. Of course. Who knew? I know. No, and I was not meaning that it was a bad thing that they were similar.

7:42 I think, you know, it's amazing to see this art, you know, echoes of your art in each feature, you know. I never took it as that. Oh, good. Okay. And I was really glad that you noticed it. It made me feel good. Good, good, good. Well, I saw this with my son who is becoming, you know, a little bit of a filmmaker himself. He's 16. I like him already. Yeah. Yes, he's been really into Guillermo and Tim Burton and that gross beauty. And yeah. And, you know, it was so funny when the creature first came on the screen, he said, oh, I hope he doesn't like this the whole time. Yeah.

8:22 He's so scary, you know, and then, you know, it was so funny how he got to know him through the movie and crying at the end and the beauty revealed itself. Were you nervous about that, the first presentation of the creature being so bold like that? No, no, no. I feel it needed that. Good. I thought so too, yeah. I think it was okay to be afraid of this thing at first. You know, I think that's the whole point is we're not sure what his intentions are, you know. Yes. We don't know how much memories he's got, and he's got multiple memories maybe all mixed into one. So I feel that his persona had to develop, which it does. Totally. So, yeah, there was never a worry about him looking, you know, frightening at first.

9:03 If anything, that's welcoming. It really sucks. It sucked you. And I mean, there was no late admission, you know, when I saw it. And I feel so bad for people who are seeing this on the small screen because it was just such a gift to see it on the big screen like that. Incredible. Yeah. I also want to ask you about the blue. I know you talk about it a lot, but just for our listeners, you know, what can you talk about the creation of the coloring of the creature? Can I talk about the blue a lot? Well, you do. No, but I mean, I know, you know, the answer. The coloring was, again, I think that we're trying to make our own version of this, of this particular character.

9:45 And, you know, Guillermo and I, you know, are sculptors, and that's what we do. So we like the beauty in statues, alabaster statues, the smoothness of ivory. You know, we thought that rather than... Ivory, yes. He's not made from any of those, but if it gives you that feeling, that's what we were trying to get was, again, and then back to something vintage. So these materials have these colorful using them, and I really wanted to use color on him because what I wanted to say was, again, You know, Frankenstein was trying to make him beautiful. I have no idea what these colors came from, wherever they were dyes. He put the pieces of flesh in to, you know, to graph out what he was doing, yada, yada. I think there's a fantasy element where you don't know what that's about, but it's there.

10:28 And visually, I think it's very appealing. So what we did when he was first born was colors are more subtle because he's a baby and he hasn't advanced yet. Mm-hmm. As he starts to get older, more of what we call the toddler years, when his hair starts to grow and stuff, those colors darkened and became what they were, almost like a butterfly to his adult self. And then once all the terrors of the world had come on, this poor guy, you know, the old man's death and the house, his own father trying to kill him. Yeah, he had the colors got darker and deeper and more gritty. And he became more, you know, I wouldn't know what the term is, but more human and more leathery in their appearance. Right. And the very last shot of the movie when he absorbs the sunlight and realizes this is his fate.

11:13 Then I put the softer use back in there to say, hey, look, he's back to being a flutter pie. He's a suspect. You know, he's accepted what he is. And he's no longer as a. I don't know, anguished and safe, you know. Well, you saw the movie, you know the outcome. So that's what it was. It was developed in that way. And of course, the hair itself had to show a passage of time as well. It helped us there, you know. And it was incredible. The progression was so... Thank you. realistic i'm like this is happening before i just accept you know you just accept it that it's really happening all before your eyes and victor's progression um you know you seem to age as the minutes went by it was just phenomenal how how believable and realistic that all was were there any prosthetics used on victor no not at all that was all um you know jordan's handiwork in the makeup department yeah no no there was no process we had talked about using prosthetics and i think we made some subtle prosthetics We never tested him.

12:11 And I think he ultimately decided he wasn't needed. And I don't think they were needed. No, no, no, no. I don't think they were needed. You would have had to, you know, steal some from the creature. And, you know, that would have been. He had enough to go around. Yeah, exactly. What a great segue. Yeah. Speaking of testing, I know you had you had fit these for Andrew Garfield for nine months and and that, you know, did not happen. And you had nine weeks to find Jacob and fit it. What was that like, that scramble like? Were you panicked at all? We didn't do too many fittings with Andrew, but we did.

12:52 I did sculpt all of his pieces on his head and his body and ready for him. We did one test, which I was making alterations from, which the makeup was kind of similar to Jacob's, but certainly not the same. It was still from the same theory. Before I forget, may I interrupt a bit here? Yeah, of course. When he was first born, the creature, he had to look man-made, you know? Yes. He had to look like a piece of machinery and the scars and the cuts literally subliminally trying to tell you that. That's why it was geometric shapes. Yes. And then as he advanced, he did become a human being, you know? Yes. Then he became the worst of human beings when the world turned on him and he becomes almost the monster of the novel, you know.

13:34 But once his, you know, his love for Frick to Frankenstein, you know, that hatred gets eliminated and they become father and son. then he could relax and become the person he was so that's just add that to the makeup stages that's what it was but anyway your last question was extraordinary it was the Andrew Garfield yeah so we did do Andrew Garfield and then Guillermo called me and said hey mate you know I got some I got some news I don't think you're gonna be very happy And he said, we've got to change it up, but we can't really change the shoot date. So I know he says nine weeks, but it really wasn't nine weeks considering we hadn't cast the guy. Oh, sure.

14:14 And when we cast him, he was in Australia. He wasn't in L.A. in my shop. So it was a little less time than has been actually announced. But we got through it because there's a thing Gimo and I talked. And I think, Tiffany, is when you don't have time to do it wrong, you have to do it right. That is so true. And sometimes if you have more time, you can second guess yourself and start changing things and moving things around. So we had to do it and we had to accept it as that's what it looked like. And very gratefully, it did look good. It worked. I didn't doubt it would work, but there's always a little bit of... Sure. Travitation, you know.

14:54 Yeah, whether you know it or not, your adrenaline is just like into a surgeon. That's a really good way of putting it. That's a good analogy, actually, yes. Oh, my goodness. We had no time to sleep. We just, mainly in my shop, it was me and Meg to start with, me and my assistant Meg. And we just didn't sleep. I hardly slept. I slept at the shop when I crashed and then woke up at the shop and carried on and would run home at lunch for a shower and come back again. Wow. And it, because the job had to be done and I was so utterly flattered that Kimo had awarded me this job of doing the Frankenstein creature for another generation. Hmm. it is, it is what it is. And Victor Frankenstein looked like he almost killed himself making it.

15:35 And if I'm the real life Victor Frankenstein, I almost kill myself. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Art life, art life. Yes. Yeah. I guess that makes Guillermo Haaland. I'm not sure. I was, you know, I was going to ask you that about that. How long did it take to shoot that? The actual coming alive, the, Oh, you mean him making the body of the actual resurrection? The resurrection. Yeah, it took... You know, I mean, it took a couple of days. It's so blurred in my head, Tiffany. I don't remember how many days it took, but it was very exciting because being a Frankenstein nut, as Mr. Del Toro and I am, or are, I should say, to see the thunder and lightning or hear that, and then the, you know, the body being raised up to be sparked by this new life, that was just something that we dreamt about since we were children to actually have a stab at.

16:32 And it was totally surreal. You know, it was one of those moments where the hairs do stand up on the map of your neck. On so many levels, it's all coming alive right before your very eyes. That's right. That is it. It's exactly right. Yeah. And we have the same trepidation that Victor had, you know. Right. Right. Speaking of which, you know, in releasing it to the world, Did you know you felt great about it and you were just like whatever anybody thinks is on them? Or what were you feeling about the release? You know, that's a good question because people who say, oh, they don't mind what we do think, of course we do. We want people to like what we did. But our fears, my fears were unfounded.

17:15 Didn't need to be even worried about that because the thing was took off like a rocket. Yeah. I've seen my creature's face in a hundred thousand posts. Do you know what I mean? Drawings, artwork, whatever these fans are actually really taking to this character. So it all worked out for the best. But yes, it did. The first time I watched it was in the editing room. And you come out, because obviously the first time you're watching your own work, I have to admit. Good or bad, you're going, that's nice. Then the second time I kind of was watching it for all the work that all my colleagues had done, people like Dennis on the visual effects and people like that, to see the actors themselves, Tamara's set designs, Guy Davis's designs, all of these people who, it was nice, then I could look at all their work and say, wow, how talented my colleagues are.

18:07 But then the third time when I watched on the big screen was a time I could sink in that chair and pretend to be a boy again. And I thought it was absolutely magical. I thought it was absolutely magical. Did you see it with an audience ever? Yeah, I first saw it at TIFF. And that was incredible. The second time I'd seen it on a big screen was in LA at Grauman's. And that one for me was the one that sank it home to me. And I was so, I've not watched it since because I'm scared of watching it on the small screen for now. You know what I mean? Only because of my way on work. When I'm home on my huge TV, I'm bursting to watch it. Yes. Oh, sure. And don't you feel like you just want that feeling to stay with you, you know, that experience at Grauman's?

18:48 Yeah. And I think it will. I think it will. You know, we remade the Frankenstein lore and the Frankenstein world and the Frankenstein creature. And I think, again, Kimo and I, Kimo I met over Frankenstein. We bonded. I did read that. That's amazing. Can you tell me that story from your point of view again? Yeah, I was attending a convention in LA called Monster Poser. And it had some work on display. It wasn't Frankenstein at that point. It was the Wolfman and Larry Talbot, his alter ego. And Kimo had saw the work, but hadn't seen me. We didn't run into each other. Yeah. And then several weeks later, I got an email saying, hey, I'm Guillermo del Toro from an old forum.

19:29 And I always say that Guillermo was like Peter Falk Colombo because how he found me through this thing was incredible bit of detective work. But he did. And he wrote to me and I said, well, is it really you first and foremost? Yeah, it is you. So we talked and I talked about what he decided on having was a Frankenstein in the makeup chair, Boris Karloff. So that was the first piece I created for him. So our first meeting was Frankenstein. And here we are now, you know, 14 years later. Hey, well, I read that he said, I'm making Frankenstein and I'm not doing it without you. So it's either being paid or it's not. That was, that was, yeah, that was, we were working on Guillermo del Toro's cabinet of curiosities over here in Toronto where I am right now.

20:13 And Guillermo called me to breakfast. With Miles Dale, probably to get me off his back and said, we're going to do Frankenstein, as you know, and I'm letting you run right now. I need you to do the creature. If you don't do the creature, then I'm not doing the movie. So he said, so it's on you. Are we doing it or are we not doing it? And I says, well, of course I'm going to do it. And he said, well, if you fall over in the snow tonight and bang your head, he said, we're not doing the movie. He said, so be careful. So he said, finish your eggs and let me know by the end of the thing if we're going to do it. Finish your eggs. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He's a very witty man. And of course I wanted to do it. I was very flattered that Guillermo and Miles Dale asked me to do it. And when I left, the hotel.

20:55 I was staying at a much smaller one. When we left the hotel and I got my Uber, not my chauffeur, to drive me back to the hotel and I got out and I tried to go into the hotel elevator but I felt like Will Smith at the end of In Pursuit of Happiness. I was so bursting with... Pride and happiness. I wanted to tell everyone around me, but I couldn't tell anybody because they thought I was crazy. So it was one of those moments when I couldn't get in the elevator. I had to walk back to the street and pace up and down for five minutes. And then I could go in my room and call Meg, my partner, right away and say, we're doing Frankenstein. I can see the whole thing. I just love that. It was exciting. You felt like a little boy all over again.

21:36 It never left me. It still doesn't, you know. Well, all of that shows up on screen. It really does. The two of you together is a, I mean, I love all of your work together, but this is extraordinary. And I'm just so excited for you. I, I mean, I'm manifesting that you're getting that Oscar and I just, I just, I'm going to watch this probably three more times this Christmas as is everybody else. I hope they have like, um, I hope they have over the holidays, like they put it back in the theaters for a bit for some people who might have missed it the first time. It would be nice, right? Yeah. That would be nice. Come on, Netflix.

22:16 Yeah. But, you know, in favor of Netflix, they did put it on the TV for everyone in the world to watch. So it's okay. Of course. And, you know, TVs aren't what they were. Yeah. No, they're not. And some people don't like to go to the cinema as much anymore, you know, go out anymore as much. I assume it's just the generation we're in. But I think we had the best of both worlds so far. Absolutely. Absolutely. And one thing I'd like to add about working with Guillermo, if I may, Tiffany, is that this creature only belonged in a Guillermo del Toro movie. Wow. If another director comes to me and said I'm doing Frankenstein, I would have thought of something entirely different. And why is that? Just because he trusts me and he allows things like...

23:01 You know, let's say, this is just a for instance, I'm not sure, it's not true, but let's say, oh, there's red and blue and green on his shoulder. Well, doctors say, why, most directors, why has he got multicolors on his shoulder? It makes no sense, it should be dead flesh. But Guillermo, even if at first he's not into it, he'll listen to my reasoning and then he'll understand it and he very thankfully listens. And so he's somebody who I knew I could put colors on this guy and, you know, beauty in him and a polished look to him that I knew that my friend and director would respond to. Whereas some of the directors might not. They might say, oh, can we have undead skin? Can we have mottled zombie over here? And can we have... which I really didn't want to do because it's been done.

23:42 You're so right. Yes, absolutely. That beauty was the, I love that, that you were comparing it to ivory because that's that it did look like bone and the way that it was shaded. Yeah. And also the, even remember in the movie, you know, Victor himself has these waxes in his room and, Right. You know, these wax pieces. So we can, I want to try and put a bit of that in there, you know, to show that where his influences come from. Again, it's subliminal, just like the pharaoh's phenology head, you know, with these having the lines drawn on. We looked at that and said, okay, well, what did that fed down to his body? It's going to look man-made. So again, there was also a whole lot of thought went into that creature. He might not look at it first, but.

24:22 Oh, I think it looks. There's a lot. I think it looks at it. It absolutely looks at it. It looks like a human. And the. The one thing that I noticed online that people were saying that was really appreciated is that Victor's work is in it. You can see the quality of his work and what a brilliant surgeon he was, whereas in other Monsters of Frankenstein movies, they're... you know yeah there's a line in the script that game when i when mcgain and i first taught we didn't want those big garish yeah you know so we came up with the thought well what if he has a new technique of putting this flesh together i mean in my brain he was kind of soldering it or something you know yeah so it you know sizzled it together rather than made these because we didn't want it garish like that i don't keep using that word i can't think of a better one um So there's actually a line in the script where Victor does say that during the auditorium scene with the hat puppet we built, where he says, you know, look at the fine lines that I developed, a process I developed myself, no organ scouring.

25:23 So he does say it, you know, you hear him say he invented a technique to do this. And you also have to remember as well, this was Victor's first attempt. If you try and make a suit for the first time and you're not a tailor per se, you're going to make a few mistakes no matter how much you follow the pattern, you know? Yeah. So although it's a thing that beauty-esque, you know, there's mistakes, there's patches, there's where he did a double cut, there's areas which he didn't need to have gone in, but he did. And, you know, again, it was a working, it was his first, A first draft. That's a good term for us. It was his first draft. Again, his second one would have been even cleaner, I guess. But his first one looked like our creature.

26:04 But why did he abandon his first draft? Why did he? I knew. I think it's down to an innate jealousy. Yes. He was jealous of the thing he built. And, you know, I've read about that. It's certainly not true with me, but a lot of parents can be jealous of their own offsprings. Oh, I know. Narcissists, yeah. Yeah. And I think that that is exactly what happened with Victor, you know, the creature. He wasn't set out to be a dad. I mean, it's there in the movie. It says you built him. Now what do you do? And he's like, I never thought further than this. It's like people go out and buy a designer dog and then a week later put it in the shelter. They don't know what to do with it. Yes. And I think that's what it was. And there was that little bit of jealousy in there with the whole Elizabeth liking the creature, you know.

26:50 But if it had just said it's still in a society and realized that she was into butterflies and things like that. She was into the weak and the beautiful. And that was just her nature. There's nothing to be jealous of her. Again, I think you used the word. It was a bit of a narcissist, I believe. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And yet, you know, it was not an easy villain. You know, it was just like, I know my son was just like, I don't know why I feel so bad for him. You know, he's so mean. I was like, that's the beauty of the film. That's why that character, the antihero works every time. It really does. Yeah. Yeah. And Oscar really nailed it as well. This eccentric here. Fantastic. Just the performances, all of them. I mean, everything just came together for this beautiful film.

27:33 I did want to ask you one more thing about the eyes and how, because they were so well done and that fire in the eyes. How did, how was that created? Yeah. Well, first of all, around the creature's eyes, Guillermo and I discussed, we didn't put any heavy makeup. It's really, really, really, really hard not to put dark circles around a scully eye, you know, because it's nature to do that, or natural, I should say, to do that. So we wanted to avoid that. We wanted to keep his eyes as human as we could with very light colouring on his eyes. Then on top of that, we originally put big, dark brown lenses in bigger-than-human size to give him this doll-like appearance, you know. And one day during a fit-in, Jacob got irritated by one of the lenses.

28:17 He left the right lens. And so we took it out to clean it and put it back in. And then eventually Guillermo thought, you know what? I kind of like him with the two odd eyes. Oh, David Bowie. Yeah. So Guillermo decided upon that. So we left one contact lens out. So now we had one little eye and one bigger looking eye. Which we, in my head, I'm thinking, well, you know, Victor visited slaughterhouses as well as the gallows, so maybe put an animal eye in there. We don't know. It's mysterious. The red effect, Gimo added, that was digitally added. Okay. Because Gimo wanted it that. This side is his normal, pleasant side, but when any of his wrath comes, he shoots this side with the big eye and the red eye that glows.

29:01 Oh, that's great. Yep, that's Gimo. Oh, I love that. That's amazing. So that's how they came about. That's how the eyes came about. Plus, of course, we were aided by the fact that our actor really has very soulful eyes and these long lashes, which are not unlike the original Boris Karloff from 1931. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he's got very eyes like him. I feel like I could have done a really good likeness makeup of that creature on him if I had to. But Jacob's eyes as well. So the culmination was a lot of different areas that all became one and it worked in the movie and people seemed to really like it. So sometimes, as Guillemot says, Guillemot likes to say that Things that go wrong are actually going right.

29:45 Oh, for sure. These beautiful accidents. And lastly, much is made of how much time Jacob's in the chair. And I hear a different number every time. What number are you going to give me? Was it 10? It was 10. Okay, 10. Yeah, it'll be 20 by the time this is up here. No, it was 10 hours. You can remember that in that time, you know, it's not... Sick in the chair. Right. I mean, he's got to come in. We've got to make him feel comfortable because it's extremely grueling what Jacob went through. And I could not have gone through it. I tell you right now, I could not. I don't think many actors could. So for that reason alone, we're extremely grateful that Jacob became the creature.

30:30 So it was 10 hours. And then, you know, at the same time, Jacob will get up to stretch his legs, maybe have a bite to eat, go pet his dog, you know, whatever it does to keep his psyche calm to sit back in that chair again. Right. Yeah. And I have to say, in over 56 applications, a lot of which were 10 hours a day. Not all of them, because someone just used his head and hands for when he had the clothes on, of course, and the wig. Right. The back of the head. Then that, you know, but the man never complained once. I never heard one word of annoyance, irritability. No, nothing. The man was a pure saint and... Maybe we're expected to say that in this publicity stuff.

31:12 But I'm saying it with all my heart. I don't know anyone who could have done that better. I am so grateful to Jacob Allardy. Oh, it's certainly meant to be, right? Yeah, it was meant to be. Yeah, and if you hear Jacob talk about when he heard about the script and all of that stuff, it really was meant to be. We all came together. And I said during an interview recently on stages that on a panel that when you've got Guillermo del Toro, who's a crazy fan of Frankenstein, visually one of the best filmmakers of all time, wants to make Frankenstein. Then on top of that, he lets me help to create the creature that I've always wanted to do, being another Frankenstein nut. And then you've got an actor who will do anything you want and not complain to become this role. It was a really good trio right there to make this creature come alive.

31:54 And it was a trio attempt, completely. Create a trio team, yes. Oh, how beautiful. I'm so happy for all of you guys that it's such a success. Thank you. Thank you for your amazing gift of collaboration. Yes, yes. Well, best of luck to you for this award season. I am thrilled to have talked to you, and I appreciate you taking the time with me. Had a nice time. Thanks, Tiffany. And one last thing, when your son makes his first wearable movie, come see me. Oh, my God. He'll just die. I want to do a werewolf. So bad. I won't make him attractive either. I'll make him a scary one. Oh, nice. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, I love that.

32:35 Well, I guess he's the director. It's his choice. He'll want to be the werewolf too. He'll want to be the werewolf too. Sounds good to me. Oh, thank you so much, Mike. Thanks, Tiffany. Have a wonderful day. Look Behind the Look is a Vinyl Foot production written by me, your host, Tiffany Bartok. Produced by Jace Bartok. Edited by Victoria Pastorelli. If you're interested in learning more, find our video version on the YouTube channel, Look Behind the Look Podcast. There you can see rare photos and clips from our guests. And please follow us on Twitter at Look Behind Pod and Instagram at Look Behind the Look. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe. And tell your friends and spread the word.

33:15 You can subscribe to us on iTunes or any podcatcher of your choice. Thanks for listening to Look Behind the Look.