Why ‘superfan’ Jacob Elordi took the Long Road home to Australia

Hollywood embraced Jacob Elordi so swiftly that the Brisbane-born actor barely got to experience working in his homeland. Which is part of the reason his latest project, which has just debuted to rave reviews in Berlin, is so dear to his heart.

“It woke me up to work with people from home,” said Elordi at the premiere of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Australian director Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel. “It was a dream come true and a filmmaking experience I hadn’t quite had in my life. Long live Australian cinema. It is truly a beautiful thing, and I hope to spend a lot more time there making pictures.”

Jacob Elordi (left) and Justin Kurzel, director of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. 

Elordi, who moved to Los Angeles in 2017 when he was just 20 and became a star thanks to the teen-oriented Kissing Booth movies and Euphoria TV series, plays Dorrigo Evans, an Australian Army medical officer and POW on the Burma Railway, whose principal mission is to try to keep his comrades alive. Irish actor Ciaran Hinds plays Dorrigo in his 70s, remembering a past he doesn’t like to talk about, in the Amazon Prime Video series.

When Kurzel wrote to the Saltburn star to ask him to play Evans, Elordi jumped at it. “I remember seeing [Kurzel’s film] Snowtown when I was maybe 14 or 15,” he said. “Justin was the guy who introduced me to cinema. This was the letter I thought would never come. So when it did, it was an absolute no-brainer.”

The first two episodes screened at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival at the weekend, and were met with enthusiastic reviews. The Guardian described it as “a big, complicatedly sensual epic of wartime anguish and personal reckoning”, while The Telegraph said the two episodes “lay the groundwork for a major, lacerating – and impressively grimy – achievement”.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, starring Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday.

The Hollywood Reporter gave the series a rave. “Following Nitram and The Order, Justin Kurzel goes from strength to strength with his riveting first detour into episodic television,” wrote David Rooney. “While a current of unflinching violence runs through the director’s work, seldom if ever has the blunt shock of bloodletting played in such haunting counterpart to the pathos of brutalised humanity … there’s a lingering soulfulness here that feels new to Kurzel’s work, distilled in an intensely moving lead performance from Elordi.”

Kurzel directed the series from a script written by his regular collaborator, Shaun Grant. “My grandfather was actually on the line and a prisoner of war for several years,” Grant told the press in Berlin. “I saw the effects it had on him. And the first time I read Richard’s book, I walked away knowing my grandfather better. He didn’t speak about it. I was fortunate that Richard’s father, who also worked on the line, did.”

Kurzel’s maternal grandfather was one of the Rats of Tobruk. “And my father was a Polish immigrant after the war and had been in labour camps, so I grew up with these two very important men in my life that lived with the fog of war,” Kurzel said. “I could feel the shadow of that past very deeply.”

He was keen to make a film about the Australian experience of World War II, which is little known outside the country. “But it’s very important to our cultural history, so I feel very privileged to be able to tell this story for a wider audience.”

Jacob Elordi as Dorrigo Evans, an Australian soldier taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to labour on the Burma railway.

Prisoners in Japanese camps were starved, often to death; the actors who portrayed them committed to strict diets to become realistically emaciated.

Elordi said that was actually a calming experience. “To do that with all the lads, there was something quite profound in that. It wasn’t a torture. There was a peace that came over all of us when we were in the camps.

“You kind of reached for a level of love that goes beyond what you’re used to in your everyday because everything gets stripped away and you come down to the bare bones of, ‘Is my mate OK? Am I OK? What can I do to help? Do you want a jellybean?’ I’m really grateful to have shared that with these boys and with Justin. It was a really beautiful experience.”

It was that intensity that attracted him to acting, he said, rather than making entertainment or a solid wage. “There’s a feeling I get – and that I think everyone gets – when we watch a film, when you experience cinema, and it does that thing to you, that profound, unnameable thing that moves you, that confirms you on this planet and in this life.

“That’s what I chase as a performer,” Elordi added. “I want to be part of that. And that usually stems from the filmmaker. I’m really just like a superfan who is following his heart.”

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

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