This weekend, Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale assume the roles of the Bride of Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster in a new movie, just a few months after Jacob Elordi played the Creature in Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein.
While Watch With Us can’t wait to see how Buckley and Bale do in Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s new film, The Bride!, it also got us thinking about who we would cast as the silver screen’s most popular and classic villains.
So, we put our heads together and came up with our top casting choices for the five most famous Universal Pictures movie monsters.
This casting is easy and a tad obvious, since Doug Jones already has a storied history playing aquatic humanoid creatures. He portrays amphibious psychic Abe Sapien in del Toro’s Hellboy and Hellboy 2, and then the fish man in del Toro’s Oscar-winning The Shape of Water.
The prolific creature actor and contortionist would be a natural fit for portraying the Gill-man of The Creature from the Black Lagoon fame. A number of Creature remakes have been attempted and failed since the early 1980s, but as of August 2024, Malignant and Insidious director James Wan is attached to direct. Let’s see if he’ll make the right casting choice.
Tom Cruise as DraculaYou might be scratching your head at this one, but hear us out. While we don’t think Tom Cruise would ever actually take the part, or even be offered it in the first place, we feel it would be a very interesting role for him. As one of the most famous actors in the world, still chasing a fresh-faced appearance into his mid-60s, Cruise just naturally embodies Dracula’s whole “immortality” thing.
Plus, Cruise has already played a vampire in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. His casting as the foppish yet lethal Lestat in that 1994 flick was controversial, as many didn’t think he could pull it off, but he did, and he can do it again with the ultimate creature of the night.
Ethan Hawke as the Phantom of the Opera
Ethan Hawke has stepped outside of his wheelhouse and proven himself to be a great horror movie villain in The Black Phone and Black Phone 2. As the Grabber, he physically manifests a character that is wildly eccentric and unnerving — partly due to the fact that the character wears a creepy mask, so Hawke felt he needed to overcompensate for the fact that his facial expressions would be obscured.
This makes his casting as the titular character in Phantom of the Opera a no-brainer. Hawke is already accustomed to giving a great performance from behind a Halloween mask, and we believe he’d imbue the necessary histrionics to make the Phantom work while also making it his own thing.
Alexander Skarsgard as Frankenstein’s MonsterA prerequisite for being Frankenstein’s monster is to be tall, but that can’t be the only thing. And while Elordi gives what is probably the performance of his career thus far in Frankenstein, we can’t help but feel like he’s a little too baby-faced for the role, even though the makeup department went to great lengths to alter his features, he still looks like a handsome, sexy Monster.
Frankenstein’s monster should be more creepy than sexy. Enter Alexander Skarsgård, who has never done real horror on the big screen. He can do drama, action and comedy, but he mostly leaves the scary roles to his younger brother. This makes sense, as Bill Skarsgård is naturally very creepy-looking, but people might see too much Pennywise in him if he were Frankenstein’s monster.
Like his brother and father, Stellan Skarsgård, Alex has the range and magnetism to play the role. He also has a slight natural ruggedness to his face and an intense gaze that would make his man-made monster fearsome, aloof and most importantly, tragic. That worked for Boris Karloff, still the best-known Frankenstein’s Monster, and it will work wonders for Skarsgård.
Bradley Cooper as the Invisible Man might seem a bit out of left field, but, again, there is a method to our madness. Director Leigh Whannell did a pretty good job of making his The Invisible Man about trauma back in 2020. But what if the Invisible Man went back to his roots of being a really weird a–hole who turns himself invisible and then goes insane? For a wacky role like that, you need an actor who relies on only his voice, as the OG Invisible Man spends a large chunk of the film covered in bandages.
Cooper would be a perfect choice for this role for two reasons: he is a great voice actor, as evidenced by his work in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and he’s proven his dramatic chops in such films as American Sniper and A Star is Born. Also, everyone underestimates just how goofy Cooper is capable of being. We think this would genuinely be a perfect match.
