‘A teenage dream come true’: The email from a cinematic hero that brought Jacob Elordi home

Jacob Elordi is tall. There is no getting around it. He looks tall on screen, all 195 centimetres of him towering over his co-stars, but somehow he’s even taller in person, especially as he bends to shake my hand.

The 27-year-old Brisbane-born actor is hot property right now. In a few short years he has gone from “the Australian unknown” – thanks New York Times! – in Netflix’s hit romcom The Kissing Booth (and its two sequels), to HBO’s dark teen drama Euphoria, to playing Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s film Priscilla. But it was his turn as the louche eldest son Felix in Emerald Fennell’s wild 2023 hit Saltburn that shot him from Gen Z heartthrob to serious contender (albeit with a candle named after his bathwater).

At the end of this year, he’ll take that one step further when he plays the monster in Guillermo Del Torro’s Frankenstein and then, next year, he’s Heathcliff to Margot Robbie’s Catherine in Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

Jacob Elordi as Dorrigo Evans and Olivia DeJonge as his girlfriend Ella in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Today, though, he’s in Sydney, minus the Heathcliff shag and sideburns – Robbie shaved them off, he says – for the premiere of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the five-part adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s deeply affecting 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel.

It’s his first headlining role and also his first role at home in about five years, when he appeared in Paul Hogan’s 2020 comedy Goodbye Mr Dundee. And before that? “I cameoed – well, maybe featured background – in a film called Swinging Safari when I was 17,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I’m in dick togs and playing a lifeguard in the ’70s.” (He was).

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he says, with a smile, is “quite different”.

“I’m obsessed with Australian cinema, and I’ve always wanted to be a part of it, but there’d never really been an opportunity that sort of felt like the right thing,” says Elordi. “And when [director Justin] Kurzel sent me an email that was like a teenage dream come true. I couldn’t quite believe that it was in my inbox.

Richard Flanagan (left), Justin Kurzel and Jacob Elordi at the Melbourne screening of The Narrow Road To The Deep North.Credit: Getty Images for Prime Video

“So regardless of what he sent me, I would have made whatever it is that he wanted. And it just happened to be this incredible piece of literature. It was a yes before I even had the offer.”

So all it takes is an email to get Elordi involved in a project?

“If you’re Justin Kurzel it is.”

Elordi is sitting at a table in the Park Hyatt with Flanagan, who has flown up from his home in Tasmania for the premiere. They are both quietly spoken and last saw each other on set during the filming of the concentration camp scenes. “I was just immensely moved by the passion and commitment of Jacob and the other actors,” says Flanagan. “They also had a belief that this story mattered in a way that just isn’t the way with a movie or a TV series.”

Directed by Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, who have worked together ever since Snowtown, the series slides between the 1940s, when Dorrigo Evans (Elordi) embarks on an affair with his uncle’s younger wife Amy (Odessa Young). He is, however, also engaged to Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but before anything can be resolved, Dorrigo is shipped off to war, where he is captured and sent to the Death Railway camp in Burma.

Heather Mitchell and Ciarán Hinds as the older Ella and Dorrigo Evans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Fast-forward 50 years or so, and we again meet Dorrigo (now played by Irish actor Ciaran Hinds), who is married to Ella (Heather Mitchell), and deeply conflicted about his standing as a national hero. “His fame seemed to him a failure of perception on the part of others.”

Flanagan had been approached by other filmmakers keen to adapt the story, but after a summer of “going back and forth” with Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, Flanagan decided he might as well get the director he wanted: Kurzel.

“What I said to Justin at the beginning is no one knows what makes a good film or TV series, but the one thing that makes it bad is fidelity to the book and a writer insisting that it be an exact replica of the book,” says Flanagan. “And I said, ‘All I want you to do is to make what you want to make on your terms, and I’ll support you all the way.’ And that’s what I did.”

Jacob Elordi as Felix Caton in Saltburn.

Elordi had read the book, but, again, Flanagan was adamant he didn’t just want the character of Dorrigo transferred from page to screen. So Elordi drew on the men in his life – “just little bits and pieces … the remnants of them that I could feel in my gut” – as well as Flanagan’s father, who was a POW on the Death Railway.

The result, says Elordi, is someone that feels familiar yet strange.

“He responds to things the way that I wish I would,” he says. “So there was a lot of, not stoicism, that’s too weak a claim, but just patience or something like that. There was a losing of the immediateness of myself and being able to sit back and watch more, as opposed to being affirmative.

Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) meets Amy (Odessa Young) in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

“It’s strange when I get asked about a character because they keep going, you know, I keep reflecting on him. He is different to what I thought [he was] a year-and-a-half ago when we were filming. Originally, I was like, ‘He’s stoic and he doesn’t smile.’ That was what I wrote in the front of my script. And Justin just kept poking me, trying to get me to smile. And there’s just two or three cuts that he smiles in, and it made him whole.”

Adds Flanagan: “It’s a very beautiful interpretation, and I was very moved by that, too. There’s this sort of melancholy, of solitude about the way Jacob plays him. Jacob and I talked early on about how the character is, in a sense, someone condemned to acting a role for the rest of his life and becoming entrapped in it, which in a way, is an actor’s dilemma.”

The POW camp scenes were filmed in the Royal National Park south of Sydney.

Flanagan visited the set on the edge of the Royal National Park just south of Sydney, where the POW camp was recreated, and was struck by the haunted faces of those playing the soldiers. They were skin and bone – had all been put on a strict diet, working with nutritionists and trainers, to make them look like emaciated prisoners.

“It was eerie to be on set because these young men had so committed themselves and starved themselves, they had a completely different energy and focus, so that they were at once very present and also very distant,” says Flanagan. “They moved entirely differently. They ceased to act and had gone somewhere else … their eyes would fix on you, and they would stare into you, and then they would sort of drift away. And that lends an extraordinary intensity to what Justin was doing.”

Elordi says Kurzel created a “theatre on the film set”, where he would set the camera behind Elordi’s shoulder and follow him as he walked about the camp. With its dark palette and the sound of cicadas droning away, it makes for an incredibly oppressive experience on screen, with the soldiers’ limbs starved and tangled together.

“That was [Kurzel’s] biggest thing,” says Elordi. “It wasn’t about being in this jungle in Burma. It was about, ‘What does the clavicle look like when it’s rotted away?’ It’s these layers of hell, with the green in the background. It was all about how the body contrasts with nature.”

Both Elordi and Flanagan are proud of the result.

Jacob Elordi greets fans at the Australian premiere of The Narrow Road to the Deep North in Sydney.Credit: Scott Ehler / Active Star Productions Pty Ltd.

“I feel two separate things,” says Flanagan, who is also an executive producer. “One is, it was very important to my father that the memory of this terrible crime against humanity never be forgotten.

“And Jacob and Justin and all the others who worked so hard in this have ensured that won’t be [forgotten]. The other is that Justin created something very different from the book, but quite extraordinary on its own merits. And that’s what I’d always hoped for, that it would be that it would stand alone as its own work. And that’s what he achieved.”

For Elordi, the series is a distillation of what he’d like to do with his career.

“This is just the type of work that I’ve kind of always wanted to do, ever since I saw Snowtown,” he says. “This is the kind of cinema I want to be a part of. This show is a cinema of memory, which is why I make movies – to remember and to confirm why I’m here and why, hopefully, everyone is – and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be a part of. So if anything, it’s like a little pat on the back to say, ‘Yep, this is right, and this is how you should spend your time.’”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 18.

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