‘We’re doomed to forget’: Jacob Elordi on the enduring power of war stories

Though Jacob Elordi’s latest project, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a work of historical fiction, the 27-year-old actor says its message rings truer than ever today.

“It’s incredibly pertinent, we’re doomed to forget everything – it’s the curse of being human that we will forget, too. I think making cinema like this is a step towards ensuring that we don’t forget and hopefully, we don’t repeat the atrocities,” said Elordi at the series’ premiere in Sydney on Monday night.

Jacob Elordi attends the Australian premiere of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.Credit: Getty Images

The five-part World War II drama series, based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, was filmed in New South Wales and features a predominantly Australian cast. It has been a homecoming of sorts for Elordi.

“I had about a year to just marinate in everything and to put it together, which is sort of my happy place, so it was a real joy preparing for the show,” he said.

Elordi plays Dorrigo Evans, a medical student from Tasmania in this compelling portrayal of the cruelty of war. The story charts his life across three periods: Dorrigo’s pre-war affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy Mulvaney, played by Odessa Young; his experiences as a prisoner of war building the Burma-Thailand railway; and his later years as a respected surgeon and reluctant war hero, played by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds.

Titans of the Australian screen, Simon Baker, Essie Davis and Heather Mitchell, also star in the series, which was adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant and directed by Justin Kurzel, whose previous films include Snowtown, Macbeth, and the True History of the Kelly Gang.

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

Elordi rose to prominence as Nate Jacobs in HBO’s hit teen drama series, Euphoria, and gained prominence for playing Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s biopic, Priscilla, as well as a leading role in satirical film Saltburn.

Flanagan is hardly a stranger to the world of film. He wrote and directed the 1998 film adaptation of his novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, and was a writer on Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 film, Australia. But for this project, Flanagan says it was important to put his complete trust in director Justin Kurzel.

“The director has to have absolute freedom, I didn’t want a copy of my novel. I wanted a work of art that was original and unique in itself,” he said.

Australian actor Thomas Weatherall, who shot to fame with the 2022 reboot of Heartbreak High, plays one of the young prisoners of war. The 24-year-old is the centre of one particularly harrowing scene, in which his character, Frank, is tortured by Japanese soldiers.

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

“There’s always one scene on the call sheet you’re terrified of … and that was the big one,” he said.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that … There was a real weight to that scene.”

For Flanagan, whose father Arch Flanagan was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, which claimed the lives of 90,000 civilians and about 12,800 Allied soldiers, the story is a deeply personal one. But its message is universal.

“We should never ever accept any evil against our fellow man in the name of some idea of a greater good because inevitably, it comes back to destroy us,” he said.

All five episodes of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will premiere on Prime Video on April 18.