Into the Deep: Jacob Elordi bares his soul in epic new TV drama
Jacob Elordi – one of Australia’s hottest exports to Hollywood – is being lauded for his leading performance in a powerful new TV drama series based on Richard Flanagan’s acclaimed WWII-set novel.
Brisbane-born Jacob Elordi is one of Hollywood’s rising stars, yet he was over the moon to return to Australia to star in Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Shot mainly in Sydney, the five-part television series, to be streamed on Prime Video, is based on Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel.
“It was a dream come true and a filmmaking experience that I haven’t quite had in my life,” commented Elordi, 27, at the recent Berlin Film Festival. “I hope to spend a lot of my time there making pictures.”
Elordi had long wanted to work with Kurzel, the director best known for Snowtown, the prize-winning Nitram and The Order, which now streams on Prime Video.
“Justin (Kurzel) had sent me a letter asking if I’d be interested in doing the show with him,” Elordi recalls. “I remember seeing Snowtown when I was 14 or 15, and I wrote his name down and knew that I wanted to work with him. So, it was a letter that I was waiting to get that I thought would never come. When that came into my inbox, it was an absolute no-brainer.”
He would have played whatever Kurzel asked him to play.
In the series Elordi plays Dorrigo Evans, an Australian army medical officer who we first see during a war in Syria in 1941. He eventually becomes a prisoner of war and is the acknowledged leader of the Australian prisoners working for the Japanese on the Thai Burma railway.
As a younger man he had been engaged to a wealthy young woman, Ella (Olivia Dejonge), before falling in love with Amy (Odessa Young), who is married to his uncle (a garrulous Simon Baker). The relationship haunts him into his older years in the 1980s, when Evans is played by acclaimed Irish actor Ciaran Hinds.
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“I was lucky to have a year before shooting to dive into literature and to talk to Richard Flanagan,” Elordi notes. “I’m really glad that I ended up doing the show, because I got to work with these lads (who play soldiers and who were with him in Berlin). Maybe 20 other blokes who were in the background went through the weight loss with us. It really woke me up to work with people from home. It was the greatest thing ever.”
In the novel, Flanagan draws on his father’s experiences as a POW, while Kurzel, a good friend of Flanagan, had memories of his grandfather as a Rat of Tobruk. Screenwriter Shaun Grant’s grandfather had also been a POW working on the Thai Burma railway.
“There’s something about their experiences that was passed on to us and is absolutely at the heart of this series,” Kurzel told the audience at the Berlin premiere.
Still, the series marks the first time Elordi has filmed a romance. He greatly enjoyed the experience.
“I just wanted to keep filming that relationship,” he says. “Odessa and I sincerely love to act, so when you’re given that freedom and Justin (Kurzel) kicks everyone out of the room and just rolls the camera in this beautiful hotel in the middle of nowhere, you just get to be.”
‘I’d like to be Richard Flanagan when I’m older …’
Also for release, on March 27, is Elordi starring in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, where he plays the younger Richard Gere (who plays a famed Canadian documentary filmmaker). I ask him who he would like to be when he is older, Gere or Ciaran Hinds?
“I’d like to be Richard Flanagan when I’m older,” he replies. “Seriously. But both of those men speak for themselves with tremendous performances and I’m just happy to share the screen in some kind of way with them. But how good is Ciaran’s (Aussie) accent?”
Elordi is on a roll. In Cannes last year he had been absent for Oh, Canada’s premiere as he was filming Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, in which he plays the monster and was busy being transformed. An insider who has seen rushes for that film says it is fabulous. Frankenstein is likely to world premiere in Venice, where Elordi made a splash as Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla in 2023.
Around the same time he also delivered a stunning turn as a gay object of adoration in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, and now re-teams with the British writer-director for her adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. He plays Heathcliff to Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw.
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That film is scheduled to release during next year’s awards season when Frankenstein will surely figure as well. Elordi also plays a gay man in On Swift Horses, which releases in the US in April, with the Australian release yet to be announced.
Despite his enormous success, Elordi remains down to earth. His father John (who immigrated from the Basque country at the age of eight) was a Brisbane house painter who built the family home, while his mum Melissa, who he once told GQ is “the finest person I know”, was a stay-at-home mum, who also worked in his school’s cafeteria.
Elordi attended Brisbane Catholic high schools, St Kevin’s College and St Joseph’s Nudgee College, and performed in school musicals from the age of 12.
After injuring his back playing rugby, he decided to pursue acting as a career and was greatly influenced by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. His mother also encouraged him to try modelling but at 195.5cm was too tall for the sample clothes.
He appeared as an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which filmed on the Gold Coast, and had a small role in Stephan Elliott’s comedy Swinging Safari (the beach scenes were likewise filmed on the Gold Coast) before moving to Los Angeles in 2017.
He starred in the Netflix romantic comedy The Kissing Booth, which was a huge success in 2018.
In Berlin, sporting long sideburns and tousled hair – for his Heathcliff role – Elordi spent time signing autographs and posing for selfies with fans at both his press conference and premiere.
His TV series castmates noted that he looked after them during Kurzel’s strenuous shoot, providing them with vitamins and jellybeans as they endured the weight loss.
“It was a very calming experience to do it with all the lads,” Elordi says. “There was something quite profound that happened, in that it wasn’t complete torture. There was a peace that came over all of us when we were in the camps. You reach a level of love that goes beyond what you’re used to in your everyday life because everything gets stripped away. You come down to the bare bones of, ‘Is my mate OK? Am I Okay? How can I help you? Do you want a jellybean?’ You’re watching each other and you’re taking care of each other, so it becomes quite primal.”
He says cinema offers a “profound, un-nameable thing that moves you and confirms you on this planet, in this life, and that’s what I chase”.
“As a performer, I want to try and be a part of that. And that usually stems from the filmmaker. So I really am like a super fan who’s following his heart.
“I have no real interest in making movies for the sake of entertainment or for making money. It’s to try and catch that impossible feeling that we all have when we see something that’s of substance to us.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North streams on Prime Video from April 18.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019, she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema.