Frankenstein: Guillermo del Toro in Conversation

Since his 1993 feature debut, Cronos, he has directed and produced numerous acclaimed films including The Devil’s Backbone,Pan’s Labyrinth, Mimic, Hellboy, Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water, which was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. His first stop-motion feature, Pinocchio, which he directed alongside the late Mark Gustafson, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film. His live-action feature, Frankenstein, is out now.

He presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3. His 25 years of programmes include The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018). He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist. In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec. Liberation Radio, his collaboration with the sound artist Nhung Nguyen and filmmaker Esther Johnson, runs at the Index Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm until January. His novel, The New Forest Murders, was published by Simon and Schuster in June; his biography The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland is published next year.

He rose to prominence with his role as Noah in Netflix's The Kissing Booth and as Nate Jacobs in the HBO drama series Euphoria. In 2023, Elordi played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla and starred as Felix Catton in Emerald Fennell's black comedy thriller Saltburn, earning a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.