This year is the sink-or-swim moment for Australian actor Jacob Elordi — after breaking out in Netflix teen hit The Kissing Booth, the 6’5 performer soon traded cringe for grit, playing the darkest inverse of the hottest guy in your school in Euphoria. But it takes time to graduate to prestigious, big-screen projects, and with four different 2023 film festival premieres, Jacob is clearly not happy coasting on fancams alone.
It’s one thing being buzzy enough to book gigs with Academy Award winning directors and cutting edge indie newcomers; delivering the goods is a whole other ball game. With an awards season packed with a whole lotta Jacob, soon everyone will see that, yes, there’s a sincere, complex emotional edge to his eye-catching, towering broodiness.
It’s hard to play characters that slip into the background when you look like that — all the Aussie actor’s most noteworthy parts are deliberately attractive and commanding to those immediately surrounding him. Whether it’s Euphoria High’s reigning scumbag-of-the-year Nate Jacobs or the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll Elvis Presley, Jacob is best utilised playing men who, on some level, are implicitly aware of the effect they have on others and use it to their advantage.
To celebrate Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s portrait of a Elvis’ young wife Priscilla Presley — closely followed by Emerald Fennell’s audacious landed gentry satire Saltburn — we delved into the streaming hits, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit parts and excruciating Australian comedies that led to Jacob Elordi’s moment in cinema’s spotlight.
14. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Wait, Jacob Elordi was in a Pirates movie?! Yes, barely. When fifth instalment Dead Men Tell No Tales shot in Australia, then-17 year old Jacob landed a role as an extra in the scene where Captain Jack Sparrow makes a trademark convoluted slapstick escape from being executed. An uncredited Jacob may play one of the British infantry redcoats standing on the gallows (we think?) and delivers the memorable line “Bring the basket!” (possibly? Probably not). Even though the internet is convinced this actor is Jacob, he’s adamant he only appeared in the background. That said, none of the redcoats are particularly memorable, nor was the film very good anyway, so it’s at the bottom of our list.
13. The Very Excellent Mr Dundee
Some serious questions need to be asked and answered about the Australian film industry. One of Jacob Elordi’s only Australian-accented roles had him play the fictional son of Paul Hogan, the Australian comedian behind Crocodile Dundee, in a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style meta-comedy about the comic’s floundering career. Washed-up celebs like Chevy Chase, Wayne Knight and John Cleese pop up more frequently than Jacob here, who has at most three scenes and is always leaning against something. Maybe all successful Aussie actors are constitutionally obligated to appear alongside a has-been national treasure before they’re allowed near Oscar-worthy projects.
12. The Kissing Booth 2
For a good chunk of this film, Jacob Elordi is isolated from the rest of the young obnoxious cast, as his character Noah Flynn is studying at Harvard away from his high school senior girlfriend Elle (Joey Fisher) in California. This is, for our purposes, completely unfair — by now, Euphoria has premiered and Jacob is clearly embarrassed to be involved in these Netflix romcoms. It would be much funnier if he was integral to the plot of every scene and we could see the light die from his eyes in real time. To his credit, he’s still, like, acting — but his reduced role means that the inexplicable 131 minute runtime drags more than the other instalments.
11. 2 Hearts
This organ donor melodrama, which tells the story of how the Gregory House of Care nonprofit was founded, feels less like a film and more like something that could be written off as a charitable contribution in the studio’s tax returns. It’s a sub-Hallmark Movie rendition of two couples whose lives were changed by organ donation, and the excitement of Jacob’s first proper leading role is deflated a bit by how flat, charmless and weirdly Christian this wannabe tear-jerker is. Sure, his aspiring college student Chris gets to be a jokester, a romantic and ultimately a bedbound saint, but he’s limited by the material. His delivery often sounds like he’s participating in the film’s table read and not acting in front of rolling cameras.
10. Emma Zander: Bad Dream
The fact that Jacob Elordi gives a better performance in this five minute music video than two feature-length supporting roles is telling, but he’s perfectly at home in Emma Zander’s dreamy electro-pop number. The 70s retro aesthetics put Jacob in a fetching turtleneck and a less fetching loveless marriage; under the somnambulism of marital neglect, Jacob’s striking features and softly piercing gaze feel at once haunting and oppressive. It’s not Elvis, but it still feels like an early blueprint for his turn in Priscilla.
9. The Kissing Booth 3
Jacob Elordi is so much taller and more charismatic than his Kissing Booth co-stars that it feels like he is the lone human starring in an all-puppet children’s TV show. Seriously, in stature and star power, he looms above Joey Fisher and Joel Courtney with a presence that feels titanic, potentially making this a campaign launch to lead the next season of Sesame Street. Anyway, his hair has calmed down over the past two movies (he still doesn’t suit blonde) and he doesn’t look like he’s constantly considering quitting acting, which for a movie like Kissing Booth 3 is the equivalent of an Academy Award-winning performance. Still, most of the heavy lifting in this searing trilogy-closer is in the soundtrack, which is still terrible but an admirable improvement over the other films (read: there’s two bangers).
8. Deep Water
Dumped on streaming after Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas’ short-lived relationship ended with Casey Affleck dumping a life-sized cardboard cutout of the actress into a dumpster, Deep Water is in dire need of being reassessed as an ingenuous comedy. Ben plays a man whose wife hates him, and gosh darn it, he just can’t stop murdering her adulterous suitors. Jacob is one of them — Ricky, a talented and alluring pianist who’s a solid two feet taller than Ana de Armas’ character and makes the fatal mistake of being alone with Ben near a body of water. His casting likely has something to do with Euphoria creator Sam Levinson contributing to Deep Water’s screenplay — it’s a confused attempt to showcase Jacob’s greater talents (like drowning??).
7. The Kissing Booth
When The Kissing Booth launched on Netflix in 2018, Jacob Elordi woke up to four million new followers on Instagram, launching him headfirst into teen heartthrob territory. Even people who hate-watched the Wattpad romance adaptation were drawn to how convincingly Jacob sold the 2011-era teenage rebel cliche, despite his 2006-era high school hunk haircut. The Kissing Booth is the definition of a Netflix Original: suffocated by its tropes and lacking the cleverness needed to elevate itself. In his first big role, Jacob isn’t yet sporting a thousand-yard-stare and clearly has no idea how big the film would propel him, and spends the film trying to work out what exactly the tone of his performance should be. We haven’t found the answer to that yet. Still, his fan-fiction bad boy thing works!
6. Swinging Safari
The best of Jacob’s Australian work, this broad, bawdy, but sweet-natured 70s throwback focuses on three suburban Aussie families and the flaring passions and feuds that occur when the parents try swinging. Guy Pearce and Kylie are the biggest names, but they rarely interact with Jacob’s character — a loveable, dumb and horny lifeguard named Rooster who gets ogled by the mums, gives high schoolers cigarettes and eagerly hooks up with the main character’s sister in every scene he’s in. You’ll be mimicking his cheerful delivery of “Aw g’day, Mr Marsh!” in no time.
5. The Mortuary Collection
In this uneven horror anthology, Jacob plays frat boy Jake, who begins his scary segment preaching about Marxist feminism to freshman girls and ends it by, um, birthing demonic spawn. One of the actor’s only forays into the macabre, Jacob leans on his beguiling but uneasy charm, until he stealths a young woman at a party and falls ill with messy, excruciating sickness. The segment’s commentary on the abusive dynamics of misogynist fraternities feels stunted, with writer-director Ryan Spindell preferring shock to thoughtful thematic messaging, but it’s a neat calling card for future Jacob horror performances, should they come.
4. Saltburn
“He’s hot and he knows it” sums up most of Jacob’s leading parts, but Emerald Fennell’s pastiche of British aristocracy taps into an unsettling undercurrent of how intoxicating being attracted to wealth can be. Jacob plays Felix Catton, an Oxford student who’s bashful, if not adequately self-aware, about the extent of his family’s ludicrous means. His adonis physique and boyish charm collide headfirst with the aspirational desires of fresher Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), as Felix becomes a symbol of people who know how much of the world is accessible to them but who can’t comprehend how zealously their life is envied. It’s the most supersonic injection of Jacob Juice we’ve seen thus far.
3. The Sweet East
There are a lot of small roles and bit parts in Sean Price Williams’ dirtbag odyssey across America’s Eastern seaboard, all relayed through the perspective of the cryptic Lilliam (Talia Ryder, doing wonders). Simon Rex, Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Rish Shah all make a significant mark, setting the stage perfectly for Jacob Elordi’s turn as Ian, a conflictingly accented indie movie star who gives voice to the vacuousness of self-mythologizing heartthrobs. It’s hard to tell if Jacob is in on the joke or the butt of it, but the way he holds himself and the texture of that accent admirably contributes to The Sweet East’s scattershot commentary on just how empty all of America’s noise is. Plus, what a way to exit a movie.
2. Euphoria
There are about a half dozen characters in Euphoria whose stories could qualify as a cultural reset, and Jacob’s explosive portrayal of high school jock/abusive sociopath Nate Jacobs ranks among the greatest. Devastated by very intense daddy issues and taking flagrant advantage of teenage ignorance of sexual abuse laws, Jacob plays Nate as a barbarian on a warpath, seemingly able to entrance or debilitate whoever he sets his eyes on. He’s petulant, infuriating, in desperate need of both psychological help and lengthy criminal prosecution — and like it or not, Jacob makes him an irregular, frenetic heartbeat behind the show’s knotted tension.
1. Priscilla
Before it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, discussion of Jacob’s casting as Elvis Presley focused on preemptive comparisons to Austin Butler’s the previous year. But rather than revelling in how Elvis occupied the spotlight, Priscilla shows the true cost of it. Seen exclusively in his domestic downtime, Elvis pushes his very young partner Priscilla (a magnetic Cailee Spaeny) to the sidelines of his life. It’s unclear how aware Elvis was of the alienation that he sentenced Priscilla to, or that the ways he expressed his own impulses and insecurities determined the boundaries of her interior world. With Jacob, Elvis is seen as a fixed, obstinate constant who, despite his frequent outbursts and calculated moments of tenderness, can’t be reached emotionally by those who need it the most. It’s the most nuanced and affecting demonstration of Jacob’s ability to perform melancholy and distance yet.