The brutal insult that led Jacob Elordi to a 2025 Oscar nomination: “That’s a great idea”
You’ve got to admit, when Jacob Elordi emerged on the scene, few of us could’ve imagined that he’d become an Oscar nominee.
He ascended into the spotlight thanks to the Netflix teen rom-com The Kissing Booth, an awful movie that was far from what you’d consider ‘cinema’. Elordi was suddenly thrust into the teen heartthrob role, although the fact that the movie was so cringeworthy didn’t do much for his standing in Hollywood, nor did it help that he returned for two more instalments in the franchise, the most recent one coming in 2021.
Luckily, a much darker and challenging role came for Elordi in 2019 when he bagged the part of Nate Jacobs in Euphoria, the HBO teen drama that explored drug abuse, and, in the case of Elordi’s character, grappling with an uneasy family dynamic and struggles with sexuality. Euphoria allowed Elordi to be taken more seriously, but still, he didn’t seem like much of a Hollywood leading man just yet.
By 2023, however, things started to shift for the Australian actor. Showing a more experimental side to himself with a role in the surreal satire The Sweet East, he then stepped into the shoes of Elvis Presley for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. Perhaps Elordi had what it took to become a major star after all?
A collaboration with Emerald Fennell in the highly talked about Saltburn, his character the subject of an intense, bathwater-drinking infatuation, sealed the deal for Elordi. This was a star in the making who’d simply happened to make one of the biggest mistakes of his career early on. The Kissing Booth wasn’t the ideal start if he wanted to prove himself to be a veritable talent, and he was going to have to work extra hard to show that he was more than a Netflix teen movie star.
Funnily enough, though, it was his experience of working on The Kissing Booth that actually led him to his Oscar-nominated role in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. You might be wondering how a role in a terrible teen movie could form a direct line to an Academy Award contender, but we really might not have seen him playing The Creature if not for the backlash he received from his Kissing Booth performance.
At a Q&A following a Frankenstein screening, the actor revealed how he had been planning to find a way to play the iconic character for quite some time. “I quite arrogantly inserted myself into this movie years before. I had read when I made my first movie, The Kissing Booth…I was reading tweets about myself, because I’m insane and an actor,” he said, “And one of the tweets said, ‘This plank of wood is so boring he could play nothing but Frankenstein’s creature’.”
Clearly, Elordi’s acting skills hadn’t fully developed when he was in The Kissing Booth. It’s not like he was given much challenging material to work with that would really push him, after all. “I never forgot that, and I remember reading it. I was like 22, and I was like ‘That’s a great idea’,” he added.
Luck was in his favour, because del Toro cast him after Andrew Garfield dropped out over scheduling conflicts. Thanks to Elordi voicing his interest in starring in Frankenstein to a makeup artist on the set of Priscilla, his desire made its way over to del Toro, leading him to the part.
