Monster

I meet Mia Goth in late August in Pasadena in a small park in the middle of the California Institute of Technology’s campus. She selects a bench in the shade, fronted by a series of small ponds and encircled by buildings housing the genius minds of tomorrow. It is rather on the nose, I tell her, given the day’s subject matter. She is the female lead in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the celebrated director’s 149-minute, $120 million three-decades-in-the-making passion project about a cursed inventor, and here we are, poised between the natural world and the ever-widening reaches of scientific exploration. Goth looks over her shoulder at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. “That did cross my mind,” she says impishly. “Scientists…” Really, she says she chose this little park, with its boulders and terraced pools full of friskily scrumming turtles, because it doesn’t feel like L.A. (more on that later) and because she comes here regularly with her 3-year-old daughter, Isabel. It’s one of their favorite outings. “That’s one of the beautiful things about having a child. … Things that you used to take for granted or you just weren’t present for or just completely glazed over as an adult, she really slows down,” she tells me. “This, if I was on my own, I might just look at it and appreciate it. Move on. Turtles. But with her, it becomes a whole morning.” Goth is wearing no makeup (and not in the usual starlet no-makeup makeup way—really, none), and she is beaming. Parenthood, she tells me earnestly, “is the greatest gift of my life.”

This, it must be said, differs wildly from Victor Frankenstein’s experience—as written by Mary Shelley in her iconic 1818 novel and as depicted in del Toro’s 2025 film, in theaters and on Netflix this fall. The director has taken some liberties with the text: his Dr. Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) has a cruel, demanding father, and transforms the sorrow of losing his mother, played for a few scenes by an unrecognizable Goth (truly, I triple-checked it with both Netflix and personal reps), at a young age into the determination to create life out of pieces of recovered corpses. He makes himself a parent too— just a really, really bad one. His repulsion by and abandonment of his creation (Jacob Elordi) results in a lot of unnecessary death and destruction. It’s mayhem that could have been mastered by patience, understanding, and love—basically, good mothering (there’s a lot of Freudian emphasis on Victor’s preference for milk) but also a sense of humanity. There is a reason this story has remained relevant for over two centuries and has found its moral lesson applied to everything from the French Revolution to the creation of and increasing reliance on AI: Just because we can do something, Shelley’s work insists, doesn’t mean we should.

Goth’s real role in del Toro’s film is playing Elizabeth Lavenza. In Shelley’s novel, she is Victor’s pure-hearted cousin and later wife, a benign victim who pushes the plot along. Here, the character is a refined young woman with a mind of her own who Victor finds himself inexplicably drawn to. (Could it be her uncanny similarity to his mother? There’s Freud again.) She is engaged to Victor’s guileless and kind younger brother and has a deep-pocketed uncle (Christoph Waltz) who is willingly and increasingly entangled in Victor’s experiments. Goth’s Elizabeth possesses a genuine appreciation for science, specifically entomology, and a love of both the natural and metaphysical worlds. She has spent her most recent years in a convent. The part is basically the human embodiment of pure female virtue turned all the way up to Virgin Mary levels—all quiet kindness, grace, and maternal instinct wrapped in the halo of a cerulean-feathered fascinator that highlights Goth’s eyes.

Goth spent time with some nuns in Alhambra, California, to prepare for the role, she tells me, and read the stacks of books that del Toro had given her (subjects: entomology; the book of Job; a biography of the 17th century Hieronymite nun, poet, and playwright Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; a study of the fashions of the time). She also made a playlist, which she does for all of her film projects, mostly made up of scores by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, though she later decided she needed to break up all the “composer energy” with songs by Jeff Buckley, Beirut, Eve, Big Sean, and Mariah Carey. She found the most success when she’d meditate and try to channel a higher spirit. “I started to realize that actually when I get quiet and I’m able to sit with myself and get silent and really connect to the most authentic part of me, that’s where she exists,” Goth says.

Though she describes the shoot as magical (“I would have done anything Guillermo asked me to,” Goth says with a “pinch me” air. “I never got over the fact that I was a part of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. I still haven’t gotten over it”), the set was not a nonstop party. “I was taken by how focused and how quiet and how detail oriented the set was,” she says. “I mean, everyone knew what time it was and what this represented and what it could be if we made it work. I guess, in that sense, there were parts of the job that were quite lonely.” She often feels that the energy of the character and the story end up translating to the dynamic and the vibe of the set. She says, “I think just the nature of my character being a woman, the only woman, in a Victorian world is intrinsically lonely.”

Goth believes all storytelling is, in some part, biographical, and she thinks there was a part of Shelley in all of these characters. At the time of writing Frankenstein, the 18-year-old Shelley had run away with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, just lost their out-of-wedlock child two years prior, and was pregnant with another. It was a period that The New Yorker, reviewing Muriel Spark’s 1951 biography of Shelley, summarized as “eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss.” Shelley was no stranger to the latter: Her mother, the writer, philosopher, and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, had died soon after childbirth, and her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, rejected her at 16 for her trespasses with Shelley. The impetus for Frankenstein came from a bored Lord Byron (who, it has been suggested, served as a fair amount of the inspiration for the impulsive and morality-challenged Victor and who himself impregnated Shelley’s stepsister with a child he would effectively abandon a few years later). During a stormy weekend visit, he suggested a ghost story competition. Shelley’s story became Frankenstein: a parable of man’s genius perverted to folly, as expressed through the eyes of a hideous, powerful, innocent. (Ultimately, as is so often the case, the problem was other people; as Wollstonecraft had written in 1794, “people are rendered ferocious by misery.”) “I thought a lot about [Mary Shelley] and who she was,” Goth says. “At the core part of it, she was a very lonely woman. She created a friend in the creature,” who, like all infants, didn’t ask to be born and fumbles through the world looking for love and kindness and finds mostly cruelty and fear. “That’s something that I was drawn to in the character,” Goth continues, “this feeling of always feeling kind of an outsider myself.”

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