Jacob Elordi On Playing A Haunted POW In ‘The Narrow Road To The Deep North' And His Growing Zeal For Acting As He Tees Up ‘Frankenstein' & ‘Wuthering Heights'
Jacob Elordi keeps waiting for the day he might lose his love for acting. It hasn't happened yet, and he hopes it never will.
In fact, the Australian actor, who most recently played a haunted prisoner of war in Justin Kurzel's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, feels like he's just getting started.
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'I'm just incredibly open to being a part of the circus right now, in a way. I really love being an actor. I don't know, silly as that it may sound, the love for it just keeps going deeper and deeper,' he tells Deadline.
In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, adapted from Richard Flanagan's novel, Elordi stars as Lieutenant-Colonel Dorrigo Evans, a celebrated World War II hero who is haunted by his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and memories of an affair with Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young) that sustained him through the darkest of times.
In the interview below, he breaks down his process for Narrow Road and also speaks about his upcoming roles in Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein and Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights.
DEADLINE:Snowtown.
JACOB ELORDI: Well, the whole movie was something I hadn't seen before. The kind of loose, handheld, intimate way that it was shot … and those colors and those kinds of houses, it all kind of had a great impact. But there's a couple of scenes that stand out. There was this one incredible moment where his brother comes home and something happens in the living room of their home, and Justin, just kind of sat on the door with the camera. He didn't move from the door. He didn't cut. He just sat on the door and he let this kind of horrific, Cain and Abel act play out just in this one shot. I remember never really being able to forget that shot.
DEADLINE: The Narrow Road to the Deep North?
ELORDI: I think the intrigue to me from working with him was how much space and freedom he gives the performer. He doesn't let the camera or the lights or the sound get in the way of the performance, which is not to say that happens all the time, but he's very particular about the performance coming before everything, which as an actor is like as close as you can get to a theater experience on screen. I was taken by how kind of gentle he was. It all makes sense after meeting him and then watching his films back. But he has such a sensitivity with his actors and with the frame and with his work.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: Just as an actor, yeah, I think you always want to have time to obsess over the script and get your little mind map going and see how many things you can join and what you can come up with. But I have to also say I've learned from experience now, like Frankenstein, for example, I only got cast in that just before the film. So you kind of hit the ground running. It was figuring the film out as we shot a little bit. That, in its own way, was a totally freeing experience as well. So I kind of don't know which I prefer. I think it depends on the project and where you're at.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: Well, Dorrigo is, on paper, the embodiment of stoicism and stillness. I was glad to have like a year to prepare to sort of slow my internal world down a little bit and try and find that kind of patience. I'm glad that I didn't have to rush into that.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: We shot separately. We shot what we called, on the set, the 'Summer of Love.' That was the first portion of filming, and that was a few weeks, which was pre-war. So I still had relatively okay body weight, and I was given the opportunity as a performer to have all of the memories that Dorrigo takes with him into the camps for real. We wrapped that and had a six-week break over Christmas, in which all the boys had to go into a boot camp, and we lost all our weight. Then towards the end of January, I believe, we came back in and then shot the prisoner camps. So I was lucky enough to have this long run of experience as the character, and then be met with the contrast of the death camps. So I got to play it chronologically, which is not something you get to do often when you're shooting.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: I mean, for me, it was so immediate, because I'd spent the years stripping my life back a little bit so that when I got to filming, I just got to live in it every day. My reality really was what was sort of happening for him in the story and and in his life — not in some way where it was like some hokey pokey method thing, but more just when everyone around you all put our central focus into achieving this one goal, something happens on a production, and it happens rarely, and you fall into this kind of fugue state together.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: I mean, not necessarily challenging. It's a rewarding process to sort of internalize things and contemplate things and just watch for a while and listen. There's a great gift in listening. As an actor, when you think about the craft of acting, to be able to just sit there and actually force yourself to listen instead of trying to do something or be something, is a really freeing experience. What I found in the silence is that when you do hold things in, and when you consider things, the weight of them feels so much more present than when you kind of just say how you feel all the time. So it was kind of cathartic in a way, I suppose.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: I mean, it's interesting, because it is ever-present in men, especially from that generation, and especially Australian men from that generation, our fathers and grandfathers. I think a lot of people can see the similarities there, and especially in return from war as well. Some people's dads came home and never spoke again. I don't have a social comment on it, but it's interesting.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: I mean, either fortunately or unfortunately, as a performer, you end up becoming like a cliché performer. So I spend a great deal of time, probably far too much time, sitting and looking inward. The best thing about performance for me, is the cliché — to lose yourself in somebody else's life. And I always told myself I would punch myself if I said that, but there is this very real thing that happens when you slow down and you consider things from places that you wouldn't usually. You have the liberty to consider, and then you get to attempt to experience them. There's no way you get to do all of that and it doesn't affect you in some kind of way, either like a therapy or, for some people, maybe like a curse. I don't know, but I find it incredibly cathartic.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: The funny thing is, they keep changing — the experience that I had seven years ago on a film, how I felt about it immediately to how I feel about it now, and what I've sort of learned from it. The moments where I didn't think I was learning something, I was. For example, I just worked with Guillermo del Toro, and it feels like he planted these unconscious Easter eggs in my brain. So it's an ongoing thing, but the kind of filmmakers that I've worked with whose work I love, they're the people that have made the greatest change in me. I think it's just because you're a part of somebody's singular artistic vision, you know? There's no feeling quite like that for me.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: I get more and more intrigued every day by the freedom that I have to act at the moment. So, it's nothing specific. It's more just every day I keep thinking I'm going to not feel like it, and every day I wake up and I just want to keep acting. So I'm just incredibly open to being a part of the circus right now, in a way. I really love being an actor. I don't know, silly as that it may sound, the love for it just keeps going deeper and deeper. I hope I can keep working with filmmakers that I love, and then also find new filmmakers and new ways of making movies. It's endlessly exciting.
DEADLINE:Frankenstein?
ELORDI: I mean, I think Frankenstein is an epic fairy tale. I genuinely don't think I've seen something like this. It's beautiful. I'm quite anxious for people to see it. I'm intrigued for everybody to see the creature for the first time. It's really, really beautiful work by Mike Hill.
DEADLINE:Wuthering Heights?
ELORDI: I've only seen small clips of it and still photos, but it's one of the most pleasingly photographed films that I've ever seen. It's genuinely astonishing. The screenplay that Emerald wrote is genius, and Linus Sandgren's work on the camera is untouchable. I'm so excited by the size of these movies. They're movies that make you want to go to the cinema. I haven't seen something that punches that big in a really long time.
DEADLINE:
ELORDI: This thing kind of just happened naturally, where I got the books again, because I've read them in my life, and something happened in this process where I just I read them brand new, each page with a pencil out. It just brought fresh ideas to my mind. I didn't have any kind of preconceived ideas. They're just these really rich characters, and I was really just excited to play them. I remember I went to Guillermo, and I said, 'Which version of the book should I read?' He sent me all this stuff. And then I was like, 'and do you think I should watch the movies?' And he looked at me like I was crazy. He was like, 'They're just movies. They can't f*cking hurt you.' I remember him saying that. Then I just dove in and realized that nothing could bog me down or get in my way, because I was so excited by the process.
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