Jacob Elordi Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment "When I finished the film, I felt like something had shifted, like something had come unstuck in-between my ribs," Jacob Elordi - the guest on this week's episode of The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded at the Newport Beach Film Festival - said in reference to Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. "I felt kind of free." The 28-year-old Australian actor plays The Creature in the latest big screen adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic horror novel, which received a 15-minute standing ovation following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is currently the most-watched English-language film on Netflix, and for which Elordi is currently generating considerable best supporting actor Oscar heat. Related Stories TV 'Last Chance U' Coach John Beam Shot on Laney Campus Movies Inside the 25-Year Journey to Netflix's Acclaimed 'Left-Handed Girl' He continues, "And then something happened when I was in Venice. I was there with my sister and my mom and my dad, and during that ovation, I saw them standing behind me, and I saw my agent, whom I've known for 10 years now, and I kind of looked around, and I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be my whole life. And every day since making that movie, in this industry I've felt a kind of great calm that I'm in the right place, I'm meant to be here. And that's been a really sort of profound feeling and a great comfort in an industry where you usually feel quite alien." Elordi began acting in earnest at the age of 16, after breaking his back while playing rugby. He lasted only six months at a drama school in Australia, but then he was quickly spoken for: "Just when they asked me to leave, the next Friday, I think, I booked The Kissing Booth." That 2018 Netflix teen rom-com, in which he plays the older brother of a high school girl's best friend, who is supposed to be off-limits to the high school girl but becomes her first kiss, is not a film that Elordi is particularly excited to discuss, nor are its 2020 and 2021 sequels. But it was his first big acting job, and once he finished shooting it in South Africa in 2017, he moved to the U.S. to try to parlay it into other gigs. For a while, he struck out. Because he was visiting on a visa, he could not be hired for many projects unless they had enough resources to pay for him to receive a different type of visa. After a while, he began to run out of funds and hope. "I had nowhere to live anymore, and I didn't want to ask my parents for money anymore, so I was living in my RAV4 on Mulholland Drive," he recalls. Eventually, he told his manager that he was going to return to Australia for a while, but he agreed to do one final audition, which turned out to be for the part of a troubled jock on Sam Levinson's HBO drama Euphoria. He, of course, walked away with the job. Shortly after Elordi was cast on Euphoria, The Kissing Booth dropped on Netflix and unexpectedly turned him into an overnight heartthrob. "I woke up into a completely different world," he recalls. "The Internet is insane. It was so frightening. I could feel the Internet manifesting in the real world. Like, I would go out to my coffee shop, and all of a sudden I felt like I was in The Truman Show." Then the first season of Euphoria debuted and only added to his celebrity. Soon, Elordi began landing a slew of prominent parts in films from respected auteurs. In 2023, he played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, of which he says: "I don't dance, I don't sing and I don't love to perform unless it's very kind of insulated, so I had to kind of shake all that off. And I did get fatter than I've ever been, and it was incredible." That same year, he portrayed a rich Oxford student who is preyed upon by a classmate in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. And the following year, he played the younger version of Richard Gere's dying documentarian in Paul Schrader's Oh, Canada (2024). Justin Kurzel's five-part limited series The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which he was cast as an Australian doctor who has a love affair with his uncle's young wife shortly before heading off to fight in World War II and becoming a PoW, offered the actor his first chance to act in his native accent. It was while he was shooting that grueling project that he received an email informing him that Andrew Garfield had fallen out of del Toro's Frankenstein, which was set to begin shooting in nine weeks, and that he was wanted for the part. Elordi still had five more weeks of work on The Narrow Road, but he committed to the film, knowing that he would have only four weeks to get ready for it. Del Toro, a lover of genre movies who has said that he personally relates to