“When I finished the film, I felt like something had shifted, like something had come unstuck in-between my ribs,” Jacob Elordi — the guest on this week’s episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded at the Newport Beach Film Festival — said in reference to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. “I felt kind of free.”
The 28-year-old Australian actor plays The Creature in the latest big screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel, which received a 15-minute standing ovation following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is currently the most-watched English-language film on Netflix, and for which Elordi is currently generating considerable best supporting actor Oscar heat.
He continues, “And then something happened when I was in Venice. I was there with my sister and my mom and my dad, and during that ovation, I saw them standing behind me, and I saw my agent, whom I’ve known for 10 years now, and I kind of looked around, and I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be my whole life. And every day since making that movie, in this industry I’ve felt a kind of great calm that I’m in the right place, I’m meant to be here. And that’s been a really sort of profound feeling and a great comfort in an industry where you usually feel quite alien.”
Elordi began acting in earnest at the age of 16, after breaking his back while playing rugby. He lasted only six months at a drama school in Australia, but then he was quickly spoken for: “Just when they asked me to leave, the next Friday, I think, I booked The Kissing Booth.” That 2018 Netflix teen rom-com, in which he plays the older brother of a high school girl’s best friend, who is supposed to be off-limits to the high school girl but becomes her first kiss, is not a film that Elordi is particularly excited to discuss, nor are its 2020 and 2021 sequels. But it was his first big acting job, and once he finished shooting it in South Africa in 2017, he moved to the U.S. to try to parlay it into other gigs.
For a while, he struck out. Because he was visiting on a visa, he could not be hired for many projects unless they had enough resources to pay for him to receive a different type of visa. After a while, he began to run out of funds and hope. “I had nowhere to live anymore, and I didn’t want to ask my parents for money anymore, so I was living in my RAV4 on Mulholland Drive,” he recalls. Eventually, he told his manager that he was going to return to Australia for a while, but he agreed to do one final audition, which turned out to be for the part of a troubled jock on Sam Levinson’s HBO drama Euphoria. He, of course, walked away with the job.
Shortly after Elordi was cast on Euphoria, The Kissing Booth dropped on Netflix and unexpectedly turned him into an overnight heartthrob. “I woke up into a completely different world,” he recalls. “The Internet is insane. It was so frightening. I could feel the Internet manifesting in the real world. Like, I would go out to my coffee shop, and all of a sudden I felt like I was in The Truman Show.” Then the first season of Euphoria debuted and only added to his celebrity.
Soon, Elordi began landing a slew of prominent parts in films from respected auteurs. In 2023, he played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, of which he says: “I don’t dance, I don’t sing and I don’t love to perform unless it’s very kind of insulated, so I had to kind of shake all that off. And I did get fatter than I’ve ever been, and it was incredible.” That same year, he portrayed a rich Oxford student who is preyed upon by a classmate in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. And the following year, he played the younger version of Richard Gere’s dying documentarian in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (2024).
Justin Kurzel’s five-part limited series The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which he was cast as an Australian doctor who has a love affair with his uncle’s young wife shortly before heading off to fight in World War II and becoming a PoW, offered the actor his first chance to act in his native accent. It was while he was shooting that grueling project that he received an email informing him that Andrew Garfield had fallen out of del Toro’s Frankenstein, which was set to begin shooting in nine weeks, and that he was wanted for the part. Elordi still had five more weeks of work on The Narrow Road, but he committed to the film, knowing that he would have only four weeks to get ready for it.
Del Toro, a lover of genre movies who has said that he personally relates to the Creature, had been wanting to make Frankenstein for decades, and was drawn to Elordi for the part because of the actor’s eyes — which are about the only parts of Elordi that are recognizable in the film underneath heaps of makeup and prosthetics.
“We spoke a similar language and we understood the world in a similar way, so I think he trusted me,” Elordi says of del Toro. “The one thing that he stipulated was that the prosthetics were going to be hell, but you needed to approach them as if you were at the altar and you were doing some kind of sacrificial rite — it had to be a biblical experience — and when he said that, I understood exactly what he meant, and that opened up the process for me to not even think about the prosthetics and just think about the screenplay and the character.”
For the record, Elordi would spend four to 11 hours per day in the makeup trailer being transformed into the Creature. He explains: “It was 40-something pieces, constructed like a puzzle. When it was head to toe, when he was sort of naked, it took 10, 11 hours. And then when he was clothes on, it was anywhere from four to six hours just to do his head. But it was an incredibly cathartic process. By the time I got out of the chair, it felt like the way that my blood flowed had changed direction because I’d been sitting for so long or standing for so long and sort of going in and out of these trances. You end up coming out in a monastic kind of state by the time you get to set.”
Out of Venice, the New York Times declared that Elordi “feels like a genuine discovery in the film” and that “it’s the sort of performance that could push the actor into contention for the best supporting actor race.” The same publication, in its review of the film, declared, “This is a great cast, but [he, our guest] is the standout… it is a breakout performance worthy of serious attention.”
Regardless of what happens this awards season, Elordi has many exciting projects in the pipeline for 2026. He and Fennell reunited for an adaptation of Wuthering Heights in which he plays Heathcliff opposite countrywoman Margot Robbie’s Catherine. He is the lead in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic film. And he and Lily-Rose Depp are paired together in the gothic-American fairy tale Outer Dark.
Plus, Euphoria will be back on HBO with its third season four years after its second — a gap that he says had worried him: “It was very stressful because I thought my hair was going to fall out!” He volunteers, “I just finished filming that a few weeks ago, and it’s a completely new show again. It’s got a whole new sort of life in it. It looks different, it feels different, everyone’s older now, everyone’s made so many movies and has lived so much life. But it’s huge — it’s VistaVision spectacular huge — in terms of the way that it’s shot.”
