Brisbane to Bond? Hollywood star Jacob Elordi on his new TV drama

Times

7 days ago

Since breaking through in 2023 with a transatlantic double whammy — a gilded English toff in Saltburn and a predatory Elvis Presley in Priscilla — Jacob Elordi has roared towards the top of the film star leaderboard with cheekbones set to stun. The 28-year-old Australian made his name as the bad-boy love interest in three Kissing Booth rom-coms and played an even badder boy in the teen series Euphoria. He blends light and dark with the deftness of a young Cary Grant. And he's 6ft 5in.
'You learn quickly that what people take away from those movies is your stature and your figure,' he said in 2021 of the Kissing Booth series. Them's the breaks, Jacob. He grew up in Brisbane, the son of a house painter, who gave him his Basque surname, and a stay-at-home mum and used that stature to useful effect as a rugby player before a back injury forced him to look elsewhere. The Wallabies' loss is Hollywood's gain.
Elordi, who lives in Los Angeles and is in a relationship with Olivia Jade Giannulli, an American YouTuber, is about to take another step up, playing the monster in Guillermo del Toro's forthcoming Frankenstein and Heathcliffe in an adaptation of Wuthering Heights by his Saltburn director Emerald Fennell. After we speak, Denis Villeneuve, the Canadian who made the Dune films, is confirmed as the director of the next Bond film and Elordi is regularly mentioned as a possible 007.
Before that comes a different test, playing an emaciated prisoner of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a sumptuous and intelligent new Australian miniseries, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning novel. Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, the duo behind films including True History of the Kelly Gang, the five-parter stars Elordi as Dorrigo Evans, a Tasmanian army surgeon in the Second World War. Arrogant, distant, sexually magnetic and fond of quoting the Roman poet Catullus, Dorrigo is not a bland protagonist.
'He's deeply layered and human and flawed,' Elordi says, speaking in Melbourne alongside Kurzel. 'As an actor they're the things you want to sink your teeth into.' Elordi's performance had 'a beautiful dignity and poise,' Kurzel says, praising his ability to 'stay very present within scenes'.
They caught him just before he went supernova. 'I don't mind being quoted as saying it was my idea,' says Grant, speaking a few weeks later. He first saw Elordi alongside Zendaya in Euphoria. 'I said to Justin, 'I reckon this boy is going to blow up.' I knew that one: he was good and two: he looked amazing on screen. I'm so glad that he's having this meteoric rise because he deserves it.'
Can Grant see him as Bond? 'Was it Saltburn, where he rocks around in a tux? He looks all right in them. Jacob's very talented — he could do it in a heartbeat and the accent's not an issue.' What could be an issue, for Grant at least, is his nationality. 'I know we had George Lazenby but I am of the belief that Bond should be British. In the same way that when Tom Hardy was Mad Max, I felt he should have been Australian.'
Many don't have a clue where Elordi is from, though. He is known for two things: height and handsomeness; what he is not known for is being Australian. 'One of the producers said, 'Can he do an Aussie accent?' And I was like, 'I sure hope so — he grew up in Queensland,'' Grant says.
So what was it like to talk in his normal voice? 'Mate, it was so nice but it was also really frightening because I thought I sounded like a fool,' Elordi says. 'Without this veneer of an accent to hide behind you are very much yourself. But once I got through that I didn't realise it could be so simple, that you could just think something and say it without having to put a sound on it. It was quite freeing.'
The Narrow Road to the Deep North moves around in time with dreamlike fluidity, from Dorrigo's intense affair with his uncle's young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), to his regiment being captured by the Japanese and forced to work building the Burma Railway. Also known as the Death Railway, it will be familiar as the setting for Bridge on the River Kwai. About a third of the workers on the project died, including about 90,000 slave labourers from southeast Asia and 12,000 Allied prisoners of war. The wartime scenes are cut with ones set in the Eighties, with Dorrigo now a distinguished but still philandering civilian surgeon, played by a growling Ciarán Hinds.
The shoot broke off halfway through to allow Elordi and his co-stars to lose weight for the PoW scenes, which are set in Thailand and Burma but were shot in a rainforest outside Sydney. Shedding pounds must have been tricky for the already svelte Elordi. 'I was pretty conscious of it in the year leading up to it,' he says. 'We had a six-week period where all the boys got together and we had a great trainer and nutrition team and we all cut it down as close as we could go.' How much was he eating? 'Bits and bobs. Not much.'
Experts taught them about tactics and weapons and Elordi spoke to 'a wonderful army surgeon' who helped him to understand 'the effect the job has on you and the technical aspects of performing surgeries in these high-stress situations.'
The PoWs include an amateur artist called Rabbit and a well-endowed chap nicknamed Tiny — their relentless mickey-taking and am-dram production of Romeo and Juliet ('Kiss me, you fool!') contrast with the barbarity of the Japanese captors. One man is drowned in excrement, another decapitated with a samurai sword.
Shooting the PoW scenes after the rest of the series was 'like filming two movies back to back', Grant says. 'You're highly stressed. The boys are hungry and tired and wet and in the middle of nowhere and Justin is pushing them to the edge. He does it on all of his projects — it's that striving for truth, to get an actor out of their own mind and their own skin. If that means countless takes, we'll do countless takes, although he's no David Fincher [the demanding director whom Grant worked with on the Mindhunter series]. Even if we're in pouring rain in the middle of nowhere, comfort is not a concern.' The effort was worth it — those scenes hit hard. 'People say, 'It's so hard to watch,'' Grant says. 'I'm like, 'It would have been a hell of a lot harder to live.''
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He and Kurzel saw the series as a study of three kinds of love: the fraternal love between the men, the dutiful love Dorrigo has for Ella, his wife of many years, and the romantic love he shares with Amy. 'Her body was a poem beyond memorising,' Flanagan writes in the novel of Amy, played by Young, the excellent Australian actress from Mothering Sunday.
'It was a unique love story: this summer of love that happens for six weeks and how that relationship grows even stronger while he's in the camp,' Kurzel says. 'Amy has this sort of ghost relationship with him. I found that deeply moving — the memory of this woman allows him to imagine surviving.' There are some memorable sex scenes between Elordi and Young. 'It was so playful and unguarded,' Kurzel says. 'There was an energy between them that the camera instantly got swept up in. You have to be a bit fearless in love stories, allow yourself to feel foolish at times.'
'It's not so difficult when you're working with someone like Odessa,' Elordi says. 'We want the same thing, which is to get lost in the story. You just enter a state of play.'
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Flanagan's novel is precious to Kurzel, who is good friends with the author — they both grew up in Tasmania and still live there. 'I remember being in London in 2014 when Richard won the Booker prize and we had a fantastic night together celebrating,' Kurzel says. It was Flanagan who suggested that he adapt the book into a miniseries.
Kurzel and Grant have common ground too. 'We both come from working-class backgrounds and have tough fathers,' Grant says. They have made three films together: Nitram, a psychological drama; Snowtown, based on a series of real-life murders in Adelaide; and True History of the Kelly Gang, about the outlaw Ned Kelly. 'We called them 'the wrath trilogy' because they were essentially about men or boys burning the world down,' Grant says. This project is equally cinematic but less angry, at least in parts. Again it's about masculinity, which as Grant says, 'isn't getting a lot of great press, but there's a bond between men in certain times — no more than war — when you see the best in one another'.
Even though he and Flanagan are mates, Kurzel has said that he was 'incredibly intimidated' by the idea of adapting a Booker winner. He and Grant had done it before, though: True History of the Kelly Gang was based on Peter Carey's novel, another Booker winner. Grant has adapted books by less successful writers and thinks that 'it's the ones that don't have the runs on the board that are precious rather than the Peter Careys and Richard Flanagans of the world'.
It's an important story to tell on screen. 'The contribution of the Australian soldiers, especially in World War Two, is incredibly undervalued,' Kurzel says. He cites Peter Weir's Gallipoli, about the First World War campaign, as a formative influence, but there aren't many internationally successful films beyond that. Which is sad, Kurzel says, because 'we really revere our returned soldiers'. He, Flanagan and Grant all have family connections to the war. Flanagan based his book partly on the experiences of his father, who helped to build the Burma Railway, which was intended to transfer supplies from Thailand before an invasion of India.
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Grant's grandfather was also on 'the Line', as they referred to those who worked on the railway. 'Richard's father spoke to him about what went on, which allowed Richard to write what he wrote,' Grant says. 'My grandfather was very insular. The closest thing we got was when he walked in on me watching Bridge on the River Kwai and said, 'We didn't whistle.' He was held for two years and it changed him for ever — he was in and out of hospitals and mental institutions. He was not an easy man to love, but my grandmother stood by him.'
Kurzel's grandfather was a 'Rat of Tobruk', one of the Australian soldiers who held the Libyan port through a German siege in 1941. He too 'was very quiet and distant about those experiences and it impacted his relationships with his children and his wife', Kurzel says.
We need to consider the trauma suffered by these men before we condemn their later behaviour, Grant says. Flanagan's book 'speaks so well to what makes an individual. We can't just judge them [purely] on their actions. What led to that?' The Narrow Road to the Deep North was shown in Australia in April and the response from critics and viewers has taken him aback. 'It's been phenomenal — we've had children and grandchildren of veterans speak about their gratitude.'
Kurzel admits that his 19-year-old twin daughters 'aren't so connected' to their family history, 'but it's important to me that they remember'. The presence of Elordi may help on that front.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North starts on BBC1, Jul 20, with all episodes on iPlayer
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