The award-winning choreographer brings his signature fusion of precision and emotion to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
When Guillermo del Toro resurrects a classic, he does more than retell, he reanimates. For his long-awaited 2025 adaptation of Frankenstein, the Mexican auteur has enlisted Toronto-based choreographer and actor Roberto Campanella, whose dual role as Movement Coordinator and the enigmatic Dark Angel places him at the heart of the film’s corporeal imagination.
A frequent del Toro collaborator from the nightmarish grace of The Strain to the lyrical fluidity of The Shape of Water, Campanella’s fingerprints are found wherever gesture meets mythology. In Frankenstein, his task is both physical and philosophical: to choreograph the stitching-together of broken bodies and to translate del Toro’s vision of movement as world-building.
Speaking from Toronto ahead of ProArteDanza’s Fall 2025 Season, Campanella reflects on embodiment, the soul of monsters, and how dance and movement can become cinema’s most haunting form of storytelling.
How did you begin to imagine the body of Frankenstein in motion, not only the creature, but the world that contains him?
For me, it started with imagining what it means to inhabit that world, not to create it, but to live inside it. Playing the Dark Angel in Frankenstein, I kept asking myself, what does it mean to belong to a body that’s both given and borrowed? I was thinking about weight, not just physical weight, but the kind of invisible history a body carries. The whole environment had to feel that way too, familiar but slightly off balance, like the world was holding its breath. Movement became this question of identity, whose body is this, and what happens when it starts to remember on its own?
You’ve said choreography is storytelling through muscle memory. How do you choreograph fragmentation, a body literally made from pieces?
Fragmentation is something I think about all the time, even outside of Frankenstein. The body’s never completely whole, it’s full of contradictions, instincts, impulses. When I work, or even when I move, I think of each part of the body trying to find its place, to connect. In a way, that’s storytelling, all these pieces learning to speak to each other until they start to make sense.
The Dark Angel seems to hover between anatomy and soul. Did you build its movement language from theology, anatomy, or intuition?
Playing the Dark Angel in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was about finding that balance between anatomy and spirit, being something physical but also not entirely of this world. There were no rehearsals, so everything had to happen in the moment, on set. More than anything, I had to be completely tuned in to what Guillermo had envisioned and translate that into movement. I was listening to everything, the space, the light, the camera, to figure out what the body needed to say.
Having worked with del Toro on The Strain and The Shape of Water, how would you describe the creative shorthand between you now?
Working with Guillermo has become really instinctive. I’ve been collaborating with him since 2014, so by now I feel like I understand his world physically and not just what it looks like, but what it feels like to inhabit. Sometimes he’ll just give me a single image or a word, and that’s enough. Our shorthand lives somewhere between poetry and anatomy, he speaks in visual emotion, and I respond through movement.
In The Shape of Water, gesture carried tenderness and intimacy. In Frankenstein, does movement instead communicate loneliness, or is there still redemption in the way bodies connect?
In The Shape of Water, gesture was tenderness as a kind of vocabulary of intimacy. With the Dark Angel, it became something else entirely, something more elemental. Gesture wasn’t about reaching out to another being, but about revealing what’s happening inside and that vibration between pain and purpose. The smallest movement had to carry that weight. It wasn’t about showing emotion, but letting it ripple quietly through the body as emotion you feel before you even see it.
Dancers often describe gravity as their most honest partner. In cinema, does the camera take on that role, shaping rhythm, pause, and perspective as if it were another dancer in the scene?
Yeah, absolutely, in film, the camera becomes your dance partner. It breathes with you, it pushes back, it decides what to show and what to hide. On stage, gravity is your truth; on screen, it’s the camera. I think of it as a duet. The rhythm of a pan or the stillness of a close-up can completely shift the choreography. You have to surrender to it and let the lens set the pulse.
You’ve choreographed movement for monsters from Silent Hill to It and The Expanse. What do these creatures reveal about the human condition through the way they move and how we interpret that movement as monstrous?
What’s always fascinated me about monsters is how close they are to us. The monstrous is really just the human pushed to an extreme, physically, emotionally, even morally. When I create or perform those kinds of movements, I’m not trying to erase the human, I’m trying to expose it. Their bodies show what we usually hide, hunger, fear, tenderness, confusion. That’s where movement becomes the bridge between horror and empathy.
Kate Bush and David Bowie both trained with Lindsay Kemp, whose movement told stories even in silence. Your own film work often lets the body lead before the music arrives. How do you see movement shaping emotion when it isn’t driven by sound, and whose influence do we see in your style?
I’ve always admired artists who let the body lead the music, people like Pina Bausch, Mats Ek, and of course Bowie and Bush through Lindsay Kemp. There’s something about silence that forces the movement to be honest; it exposes intention. I like to start from that, the body’s own rhythm, and let the sound come in later, almost as a memory. My influences come from theatre, film, and dance, but ultimately it’s always about letting emotion find its form before it finds its score.
Roberto Campanella brings his signature precision to both cinema and stage. In del Toro’s world, he defines how bodies tell stories; in Toronto, through ProArteDanza, he keeps developing new ones. The company’s Fall 2025 season at the Betty Oliphant Theatre (October 30 – November 2) reflects the same focus that drives his film work: collaboration, discipline, and a belief that movement remains one of storytelling’s most powerful tools.
Frankenstein is released globally on Netflix, November 07, 2025.
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