
Brisbane to Bond? Hollywood star Jacob Elordi on his new TV drama
'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.''
• 10 best Australian shows to watch right now — ranked by our critic
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.'
• The 10 best Second World War TV dramas to watch next
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.
• Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews
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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The Wonder Sisters became the Dandridge Sisters and they performed at several Harlem nightclubs, including the notorious Cotton Club, while still children. On one occasion, she was also given a valuable piece of advice, when sitting on the lap of Bill Robinson, famously known as 'Mr Bojangles'. 'Keep away from the wolves like me,' the lascivious singer said. She had a few uncredited bit parts in pictures with unfortunately prophetic names like It Can't Last Forever, but the first project that would take Dandridge from jobbing bit-part player into a starlet was the picture Sun Valley Serenade, in which she performed the hit number Chattanooga Choo Choo. It was the breakout song from the film and was not only Oscar-nominated but established Dandridge as a name in her own right, rather than simply a beautiful face in a crowd. In 1942 she married the dancer Harold Nicholas in 1942, with whom she had a child, Harolyn, in 1943. But her daughter was born with brain damage and needed lifelong care and medical attention; Dandridge only acknowledged her existence publicly in 1963, for fear it would ruin her public image. 'I wanted nothing better than to hear him say, 'marry me'' With Harolyn placed in care, Dandridge spent most of the Second World War in London, rather than Hollywood, where she performed at the London Palladium between German bombing raids. 'It was in the shelters that I developed an affinity with the English which has been with me always,' she would write, and part of this affinity was to have a love affair with the suave actor, and future Rat Pack member, Peter Lawford. Yet she also knew that it would never turn into a serious relationship because of her skin colour, even as she mused: 'If I were honest with myself…I would have to admit that I wanted nothing better than to hear him say, 'marry me.'' A proposal did not come, and she returned to America, where she came to the attention of Columbia studio head Harry Cohn after appearing in the 1951 film Tarzan's Peril: coincidentally, or not, the year that her divorce from Nicholas was finalised, after he abandoned his family in 1948. Dandridge did not, of course, play the wholesome Jane – she was in the 'exotic' role of Melmendi, Queen of the Ashuba – but was responsible for what the Motion Picture Association called the film's 'blunt sexuality' thanks to her 'provocatively revealing' costume. Fancying some of this blunt sexuality for himself, the notoriously predatory Cohn summoned her to his hotel suite in Las Vegas when she was performing in the city, and made it clear to her that, if she submitted to his advances, she would prosper. 'I was supposed to warm up, to register delight, happiness, gratitude,' she wrote. 'I was supposed to reach a sympathetic hand across the table, and he would pick it up from there. Maybe we would both stand. God knows what; maybe we would both get right down on the floor, for there wasn't even a casting couch in this barren office.' Dandridge had, however, seen off worse characters than Cohn, and dismissed his entreaties. 'I never reached out my hand,' she said. 'Monroe and I had a bond' Cohn may have closed Columbia off to her, but it barely seemed to matter. It was around this time that she first befriended Monroe, when the actress attended one of her shows at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood. The two had both attended The Actors' Lab in Los Angeles, where they first met in 1947, but true friendship would come half a decade later. 'She was one of the few stars who was always kind to me,' said Dandridge of Monroe. 'We had a bond, both being lonely in spite of the attention we got… She never treated me any differently than she would a white actress.' Their friendship lasted until Monroe's death in 1962. Dandridge was an enormous success on stage in Hollywood, New York – where she was the first black woman to perform at the Waldorf Astoria – and London alike, and she was prominently featured in a photo spread in Life magazine. As she put it, 'I didn't have to crawl into a strange bed with a strange-looking little man for it to happen.' During these performances, she was marketed and portrayed as the sexiest woman on the planet, something that was accentuated by cigarette girls selling copies of Alfred Kinsey's recent publication Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female while Dandridge was on stage. At this point, her career truly began to catch fire. Not only she did begin a love affair with Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist, but the two of them were cast in the Otto Preminger-directed film adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein II's Carmen Jones in 1954, after the two first appeared in the melodrama Bright Road the previous year. Preminger did not believe that the glamorous Dandridge would be convincing as the 'heatwave' Carmen, an ambitious factory worker who has an earthily opportunistic attitude towards sex. But she had an answer for that. 'I'm an actress. I can play a nun or a bitch. I hurried to Max Factor's studio and looked around for the right garb. I would return looking like Carmen herself…I put on heavy lipstick, worked spit curls around my face. I made myself look like a hussy.' Her outfit was 'tousled hair, dark makeup, a tight skirt, revealing blouse, and the sexiest swinging hips in town.' The impressed Preminger not only cast her in the picture, but the two were sexually involved during filming – a necessary evil, according to Dandridge: 'He intimated that it was good for the picture, for the people involved…If star and director know each other heart and soul – and the rest – the spark of it all might well leap into the beauty of the film.' Less good for the picture was her pregnancy by the married (and unattractive) Preminger; at the studio's behest, she was compelled to have an abortion. Although Dandridge did not use her own voice in Carmen Jones – she would be dubbed by white mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, to incongruous effect – the role elevated her to stardom. She won rave reviews, was nominated for an Oscar and became the first African-American woman to appear on the cover of Life. Yet Preminger now operated more as Svengali than as director, forbidding her to take on the plum supporting roles that she might have expected (such as that of the beautiful slave girl Tuptim in the film of The King and I) and instead telling her that it was leads or nothing. 'No one will ever know how I wept' This was prima facie coercive control, and now would be recognised as such. It also made her miserable. 'I had bitter nights of weeping,' she wrote. 'No one will ever know how I wept. In the morning I rose like an automaton, went through my paces, off to the gym where I whirled like a dervish, then on through the rest of the dizzying day. Cold steak. Cold cucumbers. Cold.' Offscreen, Dandridge now found herself involved in a scandalous libel action against the gossip magazine Confidential, which accused her of having extramarital relations with white musicians. (A typical headline: 'Only the Birds and the Bees Saw What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods'.) She won her case in 1957, but did not help her public persona by appearing in the film Island in the Sun, in which her character has an interracial relationship with the actor John Justin. By today's standards, the love affair is chaste indeed – meaningful glances and long embraces – but it was enough for the Motion Picture Association to suggest that the all-powerful Production Code had been breached, although it was later edited down into acceptability. She would later continue this controversy-courting by kissing the actor Curt Jurgens in the 1958 film Tamango – her first on-screen kiss with a white actor – and would reunite with Preminger for the 1958 adaptation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The film should have been a colossal hit, but the now strained relationship between director and star, outrage from the black community about the musical's perceived racism and the miscasting of Sidney Poitier in the male lead made it was a flop. Today, it is barely available (and was absent from the BFI line-up) and the impact on Dandridge's career would be considerable. She never made another major Hollywood picture, and instead returned to the clubs that she had begun her career in, with considerably less success. 'I threw myself away on a few men' The last few years of her life were unhappy and unproductive in equal measure. There was a short-lived, failed marriage to the nightclub owner Jack Denison. She described this period as 'moving around in a neurotic haze, having spasms before or after singing, sneaking in drinks, taking pills to dehydrate myself. I threw myself away on a few men, thinking I might as well have an orgasm as there isn't much else.' Impoverished, she was forced to put her daughter in a state-run mental institution, and by the time of her death on September 8 1965, at the age of 42, a once-glittering career seemed to be over. Like Monroe, she was believed to have died of a drugs overdose, in this case an accidental surfeit of antidepressants. But it has been suggested that this was suicide, a theory bolstered by her remarks to her friend Geraldine Branton: 'Whatever happens, I know you will understand.' She died with just $2.14 in the bank. Since Dandridge's death, she has been regarded as a tragic icon, as well as a trail-blazer. Halle Berry played her in the 1999 TV biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, for which Berry won an Emmy and a Golden Globe; it was only fitting that, when Berry won an Oscar for Monster's Ball a few years later, she dedicated it to Dandridge. Coincidentally, the two were born in the same hospital, 44 years apart. The actress bitterly regretted her lack of relationship with her daughter, later writing: 'All the rest is nothing, and all the rest has been nothing. The work was nothing, the applause nothing, the fortune made, that was nothing, and who knows, perhaps in my fury I let it all go.' This was unfair. For all the torment and incident of her personal life, the vibrancy and modernity of her performances on screen transform any expectations of what an African-American actress should have been doing in cinema. Dandridge was a heroine to millions, and that, rather than being an unfit mother or washed-up performer, is how posterity should remember her.