“They just didn’t cast me”: The Australian institutions Jacob Elordi couldn’t land a role in
Jacob Elordi has ironically found more success as an international star than he had in his home country.
Australia has produced some of the biggest and best movie stars in contemporary Hollywood, including Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Margot Robbie, Chris Hemsworth, Toni Collette, and Hugh Jackman, just to name a few, and continuing that legacy is Jacob Elordi, who has solidified himself as one of the most popular young actors in the world, thanks to recent box office hits.
He may have first earned attention for playing an American teenager in the HBO drama Euphoria, but it was quickly after that he proved himself worthy of the big screen. 2023 offered him an impressive double feature in which he worked alongside two acclaimed female directors; he played a dizzying heartthrob in Emerald Fennell’s unusual psychological thriller Saltburn, and offered a more grounded depiction of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla. A year later, he booked a Paul Schrader film when he played a younger version of Richard Gere in the period drama Oh, Canada.
Now that Elordi has an Oscar nomination on his résumé thanks to his acclaimed role as the monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, it seems as if he has nowhere to go but up. However, he admitted that he initially lacked confidence as an actor because he failed to get roles in his home country of Australia, revealing, “I tried so hard. I auditioned for Neighbours twice and Home and Away maybe three times, but they just didn’t cast me”.
Neighbours and Home and Away are two legendary Australian broadcast programmes that have helped to launch the careers of many young stars, and Elordi revealed that he had lost the role in part due to his lack of presence on social media.
“One time I lost it to someone that was on Australian Idol,” he said, “I had to fudge Instagram followers because they had a limit on Neighbours that you had to have 20,000 followers on social media or something. They’re probably gonna come out and say, ‘That’s not true, that’s not true’. Anyway, they didn’t cast me, and I didn’t get it.”
As is the case with many actors from Australia, Elordi’s heritage might have been a mystery to many of his fans based on how rarely he had been allowed to use his accent. In subsequent years, he played an American ex-soldier in On Swift Horses, a serial killer from Chicago in He Went That Way, and a Yorkshire infant in Wuthering Heights.
The only instance in which he got to actually play an Australian character was in the miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s popular novel in which he played a medic in World War II who was captured by the Japanese Army and forced to serve in labour camps. Although the show earned rave reviews and even landed Elordi a nomination at the Golden Globes, it earned a fraction of the audience that had seen him in Euphoria.
While missing out on a national institution may have been a disappointment for the actor, he has a long career ahead of him. At only 28, Elordi will likely have many more opportunities to try his hand at, and will next be seen in the highly anticipated science fiction adaptation The Dog Stars from director Ridley Scott.
