Every young cinephile eventually meets the great villain of childhood: the theater employee checking ages at the door. Posters promise b****, monsters, forbidden thrills, and cinematic glory, while one stubborn rating turns the box office into Fort Knox. Guillermo del Toro apparently treated this less like a rule and more like a practical-effects challenge.

Long before Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Frankenstein, the future monster maestro was already experimenting with disguises, platform shoes, and gloriously questionable facial hair in pursuit of forbidden movies.

Naturally, the man who would later build creatures for a living started by trying to build himself an older face.

During his recent appearance on On Film… With Kevin McCarthy, Guillermo del Toro and host Kevin McCarthy wandered into the sacred childhood ritual of desperately wanting access to movies meant for adults and del Toro quickly revealed that he had taken the challenge very seriously. 

“I had a fake mustache when I was a kid,” del Toro recalled. The disguise, tragically, possessed considerably less magic than one of his movie creatures.

Del Toro admitted that it didn’t work,  but failure merely sent young Guillermo back to the costume department. He also tried platform shoes and other guises while attempting to get into films such as Holocaust 2000 and Raw Meat. The latter clearly left an impression eventually, with del Toro later championing the Gary Sherman horror film as one of his favorites. 

His persistence eventually became recognizable enough to sabotage the entire operation. Del Toro remembered returning with his uncle after several failed attempts, only for somebody at the theater to recognize him immediately and loudly warn his relative against buying him a ticket.

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That pint-sized movie smuggler eventually became an animation evangelist, and his next project may be his most ambitious stop-motion swing yet.

Guillermo del Toro is currently developing The Buried Giant, his Netflix adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel. The project is now in production and marks his return to stop-motion after Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, with the filmmaker describing animation as one of cinema’s purest forms. 

The story follows elderly couple Axl and Beatrice across a post-Arthurian Britain covered by a mysterious mist that has damaged collective memory. Their journey to find their son gradually forces buried memories back to the surface, while trolls, warriors, fairies, and old wounds turn the landscape into classic del Toro territory.

He is directing and co-writing with Dennis Kelly, while Ron Perlman has joined the voice cast in an undisclosed role. Del Toro described the film as made by humans for humans. He has also argued that stop-motion allows every person, creature, and environment to belong to the same physical universe, avoiding the visual disconnect he fears a live-action version could create. 

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What do you think about Guillermo del Toro’s childhood attempts to sneak into R-rated movies? Let us know in the comments.