PAN’S LABYRINTH movie poster | ©2026 Cineverse
For its twentieth anniversary, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s dark World War II fantasy PAN’S LABYRINTH (EL LABERTINO DE FAUNO) is getting a theatrical re-release release as GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PAN’S LABYRINTH 20TH ANNIVERSARY.. Among its many honors, the movie won Academy Awards for del Toro’s original screenplay, Guillermo Navarro’s cinematography and Eugenio Caballero and Pilar Revuelta’s art direction, and received Oscar nominations for Javier Navarette’s score and David Martí and Montse Ribé’s makeup design.
In Spain in 1944, ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) has a mother (Ariadna Gil) who is pregnant and ailing, and a new stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), who is a brutal officer in Franco’s fascist army.
Doug Jones plays two characters in PAN’S LABYRINTH. One is the Faun who informs Ofelia that she is the reincarnation of the magical princess Moanna, whose father is king of the Underworld. If Ofelia can complete three tests, she will return to her true self and the kingdom. Jones’s other character is the Pale Man, who has eyes in his hands and eats children and fairies.
Jones was already well-known in Hollywood for his talents in playing roles that called for expressive physicality under heavy prosthetics makeup. He had worked with director del Toro before on 1997’s MIMIC as a human-sized insect and 2004’s HELLBOY as the heroic Abe Sapien.
However, it was PAN’S LABYRINTH that substantially broadened Jones’s career horizons. Jones reunited with del Toro for 2008’s HELLBOY: THE GOLDEN ARMY (in addition to Abe, Jones also portrayed the Chamberlain and the Angel of Death), 2015’s CRIMSON PEAK (as a pair of ghosts), del Toro’s TV series THE STRAIN (as a master vampire), and 2017’s THE SHAPE OF WATER, which won the Best Picture Oscar. In that, Jones played the completely-creature-suited but romantic Amphibian Man, who earns the love of a young woman.
Among Jones’s many other credits are series regular roles in FALLING SKIES and STAR TREK: DISCOVERY as extraterrestrial good guys, a recurring role as the vampiric Baron Afenas in WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, and the normal-person lead in the feature JERRY.
Jones gets on Zoom to talk about the legacy of PAN’S LABYRINTH itself and its impact on his career.
When Jones was first approached about playing the Faun and the Pale Man, did he simply see it as an intriguing project with an admired collaborator, or did he sense the film’s potential to change his professional trajectory?
“Both of those things,” Jones says, “interesting job and career-changing. When you read a script, and it has that much art and feeling and story to it, you kind of know, especially when you know that Guillermo del Toro wrote it and will be directing it. If I remember, that was the third script I read that week. The other two were slasher, blood on the wall horror films, so I had a lot to compare it to,” he quips.
“I said no to both of those, and then I got this script, and it was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. Art.’ So, I went on quite a journey when I turned the last page, because I was in tears, so I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh. If del Toro’s the one directing this, too, this is Oscar-worthy.’ And I was right.”
What was Jones’s first reaction to the makeup designs for PAN’S LABYRINTH? Was it “this is awesome,” or, “Oh, my God, I have to wear this”?
“Again, both. So many of my gigs in my forty years as an actor have been, ‘Oh, that looks so cool – and it’s going to be an absolute bear to wear.’ The Faun design, when I saw the maquette for that, and I saw those zigzag legs, I didn’t know how that was going to work.”
Because the Faun’s knees bend backward like the hind legs of a hooved animal, how it turned out to work, Jones explains, was that the bottom part of his real legs was wrapped in green-screen material, to be removed in visual effects, while he had prosthetic legs with a top half that angled back away from his legs and a bottom part that angled forward to meet at his foot. “So, it was a prosthetic zigzag leg that I stood straight in, if you can visualize that.”
The design for the Pale Man, Jones recalls, prompted the response, “‘Oh, gosh, no eyes in my face – my eyes are in my hands?’ And I saw those big nostrils, and I was like, ‘That’s where I’ll be looking out of.’ It was kind of cross-eyed through the nose. Del Toro, for some reason, has never put eyes on my characters where they belong,” he laughs. The Faun eyes were wide-set, so I looked through the tear ducts, but no peripheral vision, and then the Pale Man of course had eyes in the hands, so I’d look through the nose holes. So, I knew that just getting through the day was going to be an issue for all sorts of reasons.”
Additionally, “The Faun character had mechanics built into the head.” Since the eyes were part of the head structure, “An off-camera puppeteer had to do the blinking and the looking around and the brow movement, and the ears flapped. That was all servos and motors going ‘zzzzzz’ in my head the entire time, so it was a bit of a challenge to keep focus on the scene and your character while you’re having all these mechanical [aspects], and the weight, and the clumping around and the heat and the sweating inside and all of that, for both characters, really.”
Doug Jones in PAN’S LABYRINTH | ©2006 Warner Bros.
Of the two, which one was harder?
“I’m going to put the difficulty factor on the Faun, because I had to deliver paragraphs of dialogue in the Spanish language, which I don’t speak,” Jones laughs. “That was probably the toughest thing I’ve done on film, ever. After a five-hour makeup application and carrying around that kind of weight, and being up on stilts,” which made the already tall actor to stand to come in at seven feet, “hearing that buzzing in my head, and hardly being able to see or hear my costar, Ivana Baquero, was just a lot of,” he waves his hands frantically to indicate the distraction level, “and then having to deliver memorized Spanish dialogue – hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
PAN’S LABYRINTH was shot in Spain and led directly to Jones’s casting in the French film GAINSBOURG: A HEROIC LIFE as yet another prosthetic character, La Gueule.
“The connection was the makeup artists from the Spanish makeup company DDT Efectos Especiales, David Marti and Montse Ribé, from PAN’S LABYRINTH. They were hired to do this European movie in France to create the La Gueule makeup, which was the alter ego of Serge Gainsbourg. After looking at the designs and seeing the long, skinny character that our director, Joann Sfarr, wanted, they said, ‘You know, Doug Jones might be perfect to play this.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, can we get him?’ So, I trusted that we were going to do something wonderful if they were involved.”
Jones relates that shooting in French for GAINSBOURG “was less intimidating, because I knew I’d been through this before. Here was a movie in French. I did not know the French language, either, and I did work with a French coach. The thing about the Spanish in PAN’S LABYRINTH was that every letter makes a sound. I had had Spanish in high school, and I remembered that, so I was able to sound everything out, and I didn’t need a coach to get through that dialogue in the end.
“In French, every third letter makes a sound, so I didn’t know how to navigate the language from the page to my mouth. So, I did have to have a French coach to say it out loud for me, and then I phonetically heard it, and I wrote down my own phonetic version of that line that I read back to her. So, it was super-tough, but I’ve done it now twice. I’ve done two movies that weren’t in English and got through them somehow. The brain has more power than we thought it did.”
Doug Jones at the premiere of THOR | ©2011 Sue Schneider
Back in the States, “PAN’S LABYRINTH upped the ante a bit.” And not just for Jones personally. “It allowed monsters to be leading characters. instead of just being the one that crawls down a hallway chasing some young lady in her underwear – that’s the kind of monsters that we had been seeing on film for so long – this was a way to make monsters leading characters. Del Toro, again, I’m going to give him credit for being able to write and direct his monsters – he loves his monsters so, so much.
“And when you do enough press for a movie like that, and it goes through all the awards season – the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the Goyas, and the Oscars – you get an awful lot of attention and eyeballs on you. So, that just created an artistic calling card for me, where prosthetic makeup and performance and story are connected together in a way that I did end up getting a lot of calls after that, to this day.”
Does Jones think his work in PAN’S LABYRINTH has in any way helped enhance public understanding of what those kinds of performances entail, that they require a skilled actor rather than just somebody who can tolerate the pain?
Jones laughs at the question’s phrasing. “Yes. Those characters had a human performance to them that CG wouldn’t have done on its own. CG has come into the picture. And again, I’m going to give del Toro more credit, that he loves to film practically [on set, without VFX] as much as he possibly can.
“People like to watch other people. That connects us and they connect to a performance much more than the videogame kind of look that some CG characters can have. They’re getting better and better with all the technology we have now, but still, the human-to-human connection is something precious, and del Toro understands that. And so, I feel that PAN’S LABYRINTH is the movie that kind of reestablished that and drove that home, that you do want an actor who understands character and back story and emotion to play a monster.”
Has time altered Jones’s perspective on PAN’S LABYRINTH, or just deepened that perspective?
“I think it’s just deepened it. Because, like I said, from that first reading of the script, I knew that we had a story that was relatable for anyone who’s ever felt like an underdog. Can we underdogs triumph in our own lives somehow? That was the message that I took from it. Over the years now, especially having done the convention circuit – I’ve been doing fan conventions for about eighteen years now, so almost all the way back to when PAN’S LABYRINTH had come out on DVD – the shelf life of PAN’S LABYRINTH has only gotten stronger. People talk to me about it several times per day when I’m in public at an event like a convention.
“That seems to be a story that young ladies especially seem to connect with. It’s very empowering. When you have an evil character like Captain Vidal beating down on you physically and emotionally and mentally, and you still have a way to overcome and find healing, that’s a story that people still relate to, to this day. A good story is a good story, even if it’s twenty years old.”
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Article: Exclusive Interview: Actor Doug Jones talks PAN’S LABYRINTH on its 20th Anniversary
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