Doug Jones is a very humble man. Maybe it's a result of spending much of his acting career in intricate makeup, prosthetics, and digital costuming; perhaps humility is just built into the Indiana native's Midwestern DNA. Either way, his projected gee-whiz innocence led to a slightly awkward conversation when his frequent collaborator, Guillermo del Toro, initially pitched him a featured role in his new movie, The Shape of Water.

From the get-go four years ago, del Toro knew that he wanted Jones to play the Fish Man, a Creature From the Black Lagoon-inspired humanoid dragged from the Amazon to a government facility. Easy enough — after all, Jones has made a career playing these kinds of characters, and even played a kind of fish man for del Toro already,in the Hellboy movies. But there was something different about this prospective new role: he'd have to have an interspecies romance.

"He used some flowery language and told me that there was an intimate scene happening," Jones recalls, laughing. "I asked, ‘Well, what do you mean? How intimate does it get?' And he said, ‘Well... it's in a bathtub.'"

At that point, del Toro backtracked and explained the whole story, which had yet to be written and existed only in his infinitely vivid imagination. Sally Hawkins would play Elisa, a mute janitor at the secret government facility. Recognizing a kinship with the Fish Man, she decides to rescue it upon learning that the government planned on its elimination (the interference of Russian spies made people do crazy things back then…