The Australian’s Australian of the Year: Awards season beckons for Jacob Elordi

With leading roles in two of the most-talked-about films of the year, Priscilla and Saltburn, 2023 was the year Brisbane actor Jacob Elordi became a certified A-lister.

Australian actor Jacob Elordi. Picture: AFP

For years, Brisbane actor Jacob ­Elordi has been a Gen Z “It Boy”.

It all started with his role as the heart-throb in the straight-to-Netflix 2018 teen rom-com The Kissing Booth, a film that made the 26-year-old actor an overnight sensation … literally.

The Kissing Booth was released on Netflix at midnight in Los Angeles and became “one of the most watched movies in the world” according to the streamer’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos. The next morning, Elordi woke up to four million new Instagram followers.

“When I woke up, the world had changed,” he told The Australian in 2022.

So fervent was the film’s fanbase, that it spawned two sequels.

At a towering six-foot-five, with angular, matinee idol looks, Elordi was always going to be a teen sensation, but he seemed reluctant to take up that mantle.

In a 2023 interview with GQ he confessed, “I didn’t want to make those movies before I made those movies.”

He shook off his squeaky-clean image soon enough, after landing his next major role in Sam Levinson’s transgressive HBO hit ­Euphoria. In this sex-and-drugs-fuelled drama, about the hedonistic lives of Gen Z high schoolers, Elordi played the alluring but abusive Nate Jacobs. The kind of deeply flawed antihero that inspires confessions like “I shouldn’t love him, he’s pure evil, and yet …”

Euphoria, which helped turn actors Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney into the generation-defining megastars we know today, was HBO’s most viewed non-Game of Thrones show since 2004. The episodes, which dropped weekly, were always an event – friendship groups conspired to press play at the same time, and a post-screening debrief was mandatory.

While both these projects were massive for Elordi, they were zeitgeisty, not the kind of roles your gran would know about. But 2023 would change that.

It was the year that turned Elordi into an A-lister, aided by the releases of the two most talked about films of the year: Emerald Fennell’s sinister class satire Saltburn,and Priscilla Presley’s biopic Priscilla, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, and saw Elordi take on the challenging role of Elvis Presley.

Both films are generating major awards show buzz.

Caelee Spainey and Elordi in Priscilla.

And he earned his indie cred in Sean Price Williams’ critically adored drama The Sweet East, which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Still to come is Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, alongside Richard Gere and Uma Thurman, and the drama On Swift Horses, opposite Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. Both are in post-production.

With such a banner year under his belt, it’s perhaps unsurprising that The Australian’s readers have nominated Elordi for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

We encourage our readers to put in a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year, which was first won in 1971 by economist HC “Nugget” Coombs. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the form above, or sending an email to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Friday, January 19.