Jacob Elordi talks film, fame and inspiration

Aussie actor Jacob Elordi is pretty chuffed to be following in the footsteps of Steve McQueen in his role as TAG Heuer ambassador.

Jacob Elordi for TAG Heuer.

Jacob Elordi wants to get one thing straight. The white leather jacket with embroidered patches and a double racing stripe – indelibly linked to the era of TAG Heuer’s ultimate leading man, Steve McQueen – is his own. It was not provided by the brand.

“Back in Brisbane [Elordi’s home town], a colleague of my mum mentioned that they had the one Steve McQueen wore in that famous picture,” Elordi says, referring to the classic image from Le Mans (1971) in which McQueen is looking skyward while zipping his jacket, his unusual square-shaped Heuer Monaco Chronograph proudly on show. The fact that the jacket actually fits 25-year-old Elordi’s 193cm – or

6 foot 4 inches in the old measure – frame was the final serendipitous twist. “I swear to god, I sent my mum a pic of the jacket and I was like ‘I need this jacket in double XL’,” he says, going as far as to open the message thread on his phone and flash it at me. “The next day I heard that the gentleman who had the jacket was 6 foot 5. He got it out of storage, gave it to my mum and she flew it over. It’s a really crazy story.”

I have been in Elordi’s orbit for 48 hours and this is not the first time his mother has entered the conversation. Nor will it be the last. We are housed for the weekend on an 88m long and 68m high luxury yacht in Monte Carlo’s Port Hercule as guests of TAG Heuer, which takes the opportunity to announce Elordi’s new tenure as an official ambassador for the brand. He joins fellow actor Ryan Gosling in the role.

Elordi’s first mention of his mother was a couple of nights before, at the party to announce his appointment. He was invited to say a few words. And few they were. “I’ll keep it really, really short,” he said, taking the mic in both hands, hunching his shoulders and holding it close to his mouth. For an actor on the rise, he seems genuinely, quite impossibly, shy. “This is a pretty massive honour to stand here and wear this watch.

I’ve never been to Monaco before and it’s super, super beautiful. My mum said that I wouldn’t be a real actor until I did a watch campaign. So [he pauses for a beat], here you go Mum.” He brandished the new, black version of the watch made famous by McQueen – this one dubbed by collectors the Monaco Dark Lord – and with a boyish grin, handed the microphone back to TAG Heuer CEO Frédéric Arnault.

It is the 2022 Monaco Grand Prix Weekend and the charmed life of the 27-year-old Arnault seems to be influencing events as much as the storm that lurks nearby. For Friday and Saturday it remains an occasionally growling, grey-fingered presence behind the mountains that shelter the harbour. TAG Heuer’s team in the race, Red Bull Racing, finishes qualifying with current world champion Max Verstappen on the second row – historically a tough spot from which to win – alongside teammate Sergio “Checo” Pérez. All eyes are on the storm waiting in the wings. Will it make a grand entrance on race day and give the TAG Heuer- sponsored drivers a wet path to victory?

Steve McQueen wears his TAG Heuer in 1971’s Le Mans. Picture: Solar Productions

TAG Heuer has an equally monstrous presence at the race. Billboards are everywhere, not least on the track where, at one critical point, a driver slams into one. The shield logo is all but shredded although the driver quickly hops out of the car, unharmed.

“It was one of ours!” shouts Arnault cheerfully, as we observe the crash from the TAG Heuer “Lodge” above the track. Pictures of the mangled car and billboard are beamed all over the world. This weekend you cannot sidestep Arnault’s expansive bonhomie, or the brand that is firmly positioned among the top 10 luxury watch names in the world.

And neither could Elordi when he was a young actor in Sydney. “I was auditioning all the time, and there were about a million billboards of Chris Hemsworth. It was the kind of picture where wherever you moved his eyes would follow you. It said ‘Don’t Crack Under Pressure’. My mum would say ‘When you know him, that’s when you know. That’s when you know.’ So now, I guess I’m here in Monaco, like Chris has been, and now maybe I’m part of it.”

With this, he glances down at his watch questioningly. I ask him, while his eyes are still fixed on the square case with its seconds hand sweeping smoothly, why we still wear watches, given that time is now always in our pockets, and everywhere? “I think that as we go down this kind of long, winding, seemingly dark road of technology, there’s a great part of us that is still sentimental and yearning for a version of time that we can see working, that we have to set, that we have to put on,” he suggests.

“It’s got so much sentimental value, a watch, and it literally can last forever. I think there’s something in everyone that yearns for that, and wants that, because, otherwise, in a hundred years, we’re just going to be gifted iPhones, and fucking throw them out, and break them, and then we have nothing. This is pretty dark, but everyone will die, and our grandchildren will be like, ‘Well, my great grandfather gave me this cracked iPhone 11 …’

Elordi’s experience of not being able to avoid TAG Heuer in Sydney, where the brand has its most profitable boutique globally on a sales per square metre basis, will be familiar to many Australians. It’s hard for those in other countries to understand quite how comprehensively the brand cornered the market here, elevating Australia to a top-three market position for TAG Heuer, which is unheard of for any other luxury watch brand. You don’t get a good watch in Australia, you “get a TAG”.

Elordi puts the brand’s local domination down to clever integration with the country’s two greatest passions. No prizes for guessing what they are. “I’ve seen [the TAG Heuer logo] it on every single sporting event ever, and I think that’s why it’s so popular in Australia, because it’s synonymous with so many different sports. And that’s kind of the bones of what culture we have, it’s deeply embedded in sport and beer.”

Elordi, however, as a man and a character, is steeped in a different brew. Despite his towering frame and slender, athletic physique, there is no trace of blokey energy. And during this weekend in Monaco he is never once spotted with a glass or bottle of the amber nectar in his hands, preferring champagne and spirits. As for men of the stage who have proved inspirational, Elordi immediately names James Dean and Marlon Brando. Men who exuded, he says, “emotional availability”.

“You had these guys with tough exteriors who were hurting inside and displayed that. There’s this James Dean quote: ‘I’ve got Marlon Brando in one hand and Montgomery Clift in the other. How could I lose?’ So it’s like sensitivity and brute force. There’s something about that I think is really interesting, especially for men, because I think there’s a duality of that in most young men.”

There’s certainly a duality to Jacob Elordi, one that can be clearly delineated as “on-camera Jacob” and “off-camera Jacob”. When a phone or photographer’s camera appears, his face instantly reorganises itself into a smoulder. Brood vibes only. In the official photographs for TAG Heuer, he practically needs a licence for his face.

Like Gosling, Elordi lays his scene in a vintage car to match his watch, the first version of which was released in 1969. Unlike Gosling, however, there is a noticeable disjunction between his natural self and the onstage version.

In our interview, for example, once it is established that we will not be shooting any video, the muscles in his face loosen and his dark brown eyes soften. Relief. They practically shoot sparks when a pet topic is brought up: Australian actors, and his favourite acting performances.

Asked to name one, Elordi is quick: “the pencil scene” in director Christopher Nolan’s tour de force The Dark Knight, in which Heath Ledger’s Joker makes a pencil “disappear” into the head of a hapless thug. “I know that movie back to front,” he says. “I’ve seen that film … I couldn’t even tell you how many times, but it changes each viewing. The pencil scene was what jarred everyone, because you hadn’t really seen anything like that and you definitely didn’t expect it from a superhero picture. That sticks with me, but every scene in that movie is flawless.

Joel Edgerton and David Wenham are incredible, too.” He also names Succession actor Jeremy Strong – who plays that series’ most compelling character, Kendall Roy – as “a beast”, who “goes so hard into the paint”. Strong is renowned for method acting to the point of extremism, a fact keenly captured in last year’s now notorious New Yorker profile.

Where your eyes go your energy flows, and Elordi’s career has taken several dark turns since his first breakthrough hit The Kissing Booth, a straight-to-Netflix teen drama every bit as fluffy as it sounds. It shot him to fame – “it was released at midnight, and when I woke up, the world had changed” – and accrued him six million Instagram followers in record time. It was, according to Netflix, one of the most streamed movies of 2018 in both America and the rest of the world.

He consolidated his early success with a two-season stint on HBO drama Euphoria. He was cast to play Nate Jacobs, the perfect foil to his rom-com puffball Noah Flynn in Kissing Booth. Nate appears to be that stereotypical homecoming king that Americans can’t seem to get enough of. But beneath the surface he is tormented, vindictive, struggling with his identity and at war with his father.

One scene you can easily find by searching “Nate Jacobs Meltdown” provides the starkest contrast between the two roles. In it, Nate and his father have a verbal and physical altercation that culminates in Elordi’s character repeatedly slamming the back of his head into a hardwood floor. It goes for at least 10 seconds longer than is bearable. Did it actually hurt?

“No, no – it definitely hurt,” he says, “but we had a great stunt master, Jeff Barnett, and we had mats on the floor. I definitely still went for it, but all precautions were taken to make sure I was OK. I just feel a little weird ever since …” Elordi quips, in another moment of levity you will not see caught on camera anytime soon. I can’t help but wonder, what does he do to so successfully channel this kind of intensity? What is his secret weapon?

“My weapon? My mum and my dad. That’s my Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. They’ve given me two sides of a coin, and I think I have this duality I got from being raised by the two of them. I was raised with great kindness and affection, but

also my father instilled a good sense of morality and hard work. People say, ‘I’d be nothing without my parents; I wouldn’t be here’, ut for me it’s deeper than that. I don’t think I’d be able to do half of what I do if I wasn’t raised the way they raised me, and I’m really proud of that.”

And with this, we are promptly wrapped by Elordi’s publicist. With a beaming, open smile and nothing but blue skies behind us – there’s no trace of the storm that will soon wreak havoc on the 2022 Monaco Grand Prix, giving TAG Heuer first and third positions on the podium – we shake hands and hug briefly, as much of a surprise to him as it is to me. The final toss of the coin lands sunny side up.