Jacob Elordi refused to audition for Superman: “That’s too much”
According to my handy book of ‘how to talk like trendy internet people’, the way you are supposed to describe someone who is in the public eye to the degree that they seem to be almost ubiquitous is to say that they are ‘having a moment right now’. So that being the case, Jacob Elordi is having a moment right now.
Or rather, he’s been having a moment right now for a few years already, but he is about to have several moments put together. I’m going to abandon that now. Suffice to say that after his breakthrough in the bathtub water-supping Saltburn back in 2023, Elordi has become the uber-tall movie star du jour, and this month, he is going to find his way into housewives’ fantasies across the globe.
That’s because he is going to be Heathcliff in the all-new singing and dancing (there’s no singing or dancing in it) version of Wuthering Heights, the steamy bodice ripper from Saltburn director Emerald Fennell, and he’ll spend much of it with no top on, probably dripping wet and windswept, and either looking broody or hungrily snogging Margot Robbie.
Whether or not there are any moments as ‘wtf’ in it as the drain-licking efforts in her last film remains to be seen, but after the last couple of years, it’s clear that Elordi is too talented to be written off as mere eye candy, as his award nominations for Guillermo del Toro’s wondrous Frankenstein attest to.
Elordi was so good as ‘The Creature’ in the Netflix-backed fantasy starring Oscar Isaac that he has found himself as one of five actors competing for the ‘Best Actor’ at the upcoming Academy Awards in one of the most competitive fields in years. Even if he doesn’t win, the combination of the nomination and Heathcliff should ensure he is now a fully-fledged A-lister that casting directors are going to be fighting over.
Which will make the next projects he chooses to take on interesting; he’s already finished filming what will be his last episodes of the HBO show that first brought him some recognition, the teen drama Euphoria, and he’s also wrapped on Alien director Ridley Scott’s upcoming sci-fi thriller The Dog Stars, about a global pandemic that leaves any survivors at the mercy of a bloodthirsty group called Reapers.
One genre that it seems unlikely the Australian-born 28-year-old will be involved in anytime soon, however, is a superhero film, as he has turned one down in recent years. He told GQ: “Well, they asked me to read for Superman. That was immediately, ‘No, thank you.’ That’s too much. That’s too dark for me.”
That would have been James Gunn’s big-budget blockbuster from last year, which ended up featuring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel and did huge numbers at the box office, with a sequel called Man of Tomorrow now penned in for a July 2027 release.
But could he see himself in a caped crusader movie like his late former antipodean Heath Ledger in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? Pressed on the matter, Elordi gave a suitably straight bat answer, only saying: “Not particularly, no. I’ve always been told to say a rounded answer or my agent will get mad at me.”
Concluding, “And obviously, anything can happen, but at this stage in my life, I don’t see myself having any interest in that. I like to make what I would watch, and I get very restless watching those movies.”
