Jacob Elordi, the heartthrob who earned his first Oscar nomination under 42 prosthetics

Jacob Elordi

Photo: JoshPopov / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 26, 1997 Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Kissing Booth 2, The Kissing Booth, Frankenstein
Awards	Critics' Choice · AACTA International · AACTA · Saturn Award

There is a version of Jacob Elordi that the internet settled on years ago: the tall Australian with the jawline, the boyfriend from a Netflix romance, the young man photographed carrying a designer handbag through an airport. There is another version that spent most of a year disappearing inside forty-two silicone prosthetics, speaking in the halting voice of a creature stitched together from corpses, and came out the other side with his first Academy Award nomination. The distance between those two men is the real subject of his career, and he has spent almost a decade trying to close it on his own terms.

He has never pretended the first version was an accident he regrets. He has said plainly that he took the teen romance because he needed the money, that he found the films ridiculous, and that the sudden fame they brought made him feel like a poster rather than a person. What makes him interesting is what he did next. Instead of fleeing the audience that found him, he used the visibility to get into rooms with Sofia Coppola, Emerald Fennell, Paul Schrader, Guillermo del Toro and Ridley Scott, and he chose parts in which his looks were either a weapon, a problem or a mask. Few actors of his generation have been so openly suspicious of the thing that made them famous, and fewer have turned that suspicion into a method.

The results have not been uniform. The same year that brought an Oscar nomination and a romantic epic that grossed more than two hundred million dollars also brought the death of the character that made him credible and a science-fiction film that almost nobody went to see. That mix of triumph and misfire is exactly why his next moves matter.

Brisbane roots and a Basque father

Jacob Nathaniel Elordi grew up in Brisbane, Queensland, where he was born on June 26, 1997. The household was working-class and crowded with women: he is the youngest of four children and has three older sisters. His mother, Melissa, stayed at home for much of his childhood and also worked in the cafeteria at his school. His father, John, was a house painter who spent thirteen years building the family home with his own hands, a detail Elordi returns to often when he talks about work, patience and what a man is supposed to be. He has described his father as a “totem of the kind of man that I would like to be”.

The surname comes from the north of Spain, and the distinction matters to him. John Elordi was born in Markina-Xemein, in the Basque province of Biscay, and emigrated to Australia from Bilbao as an eight-year-old, leaving with very little money during the Franco dictatorship. The actor’s paternal grandfather, Joaquín Elordi, came from the fishing town of Ondarroa. Elordi has corrected online biographies that described his ancestry simply as Spanish, insisting on the word Basque, and he speaks about that heritage as something inherited through effort rather than through postcards: a family that arrived with nothing and built everything, including, literally, the walls.

Performing arrived early and slightly by chance. Around the age of twelve he began appearing in school musicals, playing the Cat in the Hat in Seussical and taking part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and he later played Oberon, King of the Fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The stage did not make him popular with everyone. He has spoken about homophobic bullying from classmates who thought theatre was not something a boy like him should do. He has also said that excelling at both sport and drama gave him an “abundance of confidence”, a sense that he did not need to choose between the rugby field and the rehearsal room.

His schooling took him through two private Catholic boys’ schools, St Kevin’s College in Melbourne and St Joseph’s College, Nudgee, in Brisbane. He has admitted that he felt “deeply unsettled” in those environments and that he “barely finished”. The decisive turn came from two directions at once. A serious back injury on the rugby pitch closed off the athletic future that many around him had assumed, and at fifteen a drama class put Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in front of him. He has described acting after that point as his “church”, a word he still uses without irony.

The influences he names are revealing. He grew up watching Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Daniel Day-Lewis, but the actor who mattered most was a fellow Australian, Heath Ledger, and especially Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight: a performance by a handsome leading man who made himself unrecognisable and frightening. It is hard to watch Elordi’s later work without seeing that example somewhere in the background. At fourteen he started practising an American accent, modelling it at first, by his own account, on Vin Diesel. At fifteen his mother suggested he try modelling, and he was told he was too tall for the sample sizes. At that age he also made a promise to her that would take thirteen years to keep: if he ever went to the Oscars, she would be his date.

Jacob Elordi in The Kissing Booth (2018)

Los Angeles and the Kissing Booth trap

Elordi moved to Los Angeles in 2017 with little more than ambition. His first brush with a Hollywood set was as an uncredited extra, a redcoat soldier, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which shot on Australia’s Gold Coast. His first credited screen role came in the Australian comedy Swinging Safari, released in 2018, in which he played a teenager called Rooster.

The break that changed his life arrived almost immediately afterwards. Netflix cast him as Noah Flynn, the brooding older brother and motorcycle-riding love interest of The Kissing Booth, a romantic comedy adapted from a novel that its author, Beth Reekles, had first published online as a teenager. He learned to ride a motorbike for the part. Critics were largely unkind to the film when it premiered in May 2018, but that barely mattered: it became one of the most-watched titles on the platform that year and turned a completely unknown actor into a global teen idol almost overnight. He returned as Noah in The Kissing Booth 2 in 2020 and The Kissing Booth 3 in 2021.

From the start, his relationship with the franchise was uneasy, and he has never tried to hide that. In later interviews he said he had not wanted to make the films in the first place and had taken the job because he needed it. He called them “ridiculous” and described them as “an escape” that he feared could become a trap, the kind of commercial success that quietly decides what kind of actor you are allowed to be. He recalled “going to war” on set, unsuccessfully, to let Noah smoke cigarettes as he did in the book, because he thought it was dishonest to polish the bad-boy image for a young audience. When some fans and commentators called him pretentious for talking this way, he pushed back: caring about the quality of your work, he argued, is not a pose.

The fame itself was harder to handle than the reviews. Elordi has described the objectification that followed the first film as deeply unsettling, saying he felt like “a poster” or “a billboard” and “so far from myself” that he seriously considered quitting acting. It did not make him rich either. In the months between the first Kissing Booth and his next major job he had very little money, and he has said he sometimes slept in his 2004 Mitsubishi on Mulholland Drive or on friends’ couches. When the audition for an HBO drama came along, he treated it as a last attempt before going home to Australia to regroup.

It is easy, looking back, to read his later criticism of the franchise as a calculated repositioning, a young actor distancing himself from the genre that made him famous in order to be taken seriously. There is probably some truth in that. But the complaints were consistent long before they became useful, and the career he built afterwards has followed them with unusual discipline.

Nate Jacobs and the Euphoria years

The audition he feared might be his last was for Euphoria, Sam Levinson‘s adaptation of an Israeli series about teenagers, drugs, sex and trauma in an American suburb. Elordi was cast as Nate Jacobs, the high-school quarterback who is also the show’s most dangerous character: a controlling, violent young man shaped by the secret life of his father, Cal, and by his own repressed desires. The series premiered on HBO in June 2019, with Zendaya as its narrator and lead, and quickly became one of the most discussed dramas of its era.

Nate was the opposite of Noah Flynn in every way that mattered. Where the Netflix films asked Elordi to be charming and safe, Euphoria asked him to make charm frightening. He described the character as a narcissist and a sociopath, and he played him with a stillness that made every flash of violence land harder. Critics who had dismissed him as a pin-up began to talk about range. Zendaya and Levinson both praised his commitment, and the performance became, for many viewers, the moment they realised the boy from The Kissing Booth was an actor. He was not nominated for an Emmy, which some commentators treated as an oversight, but the role opened doors that no streaming romance could.

The show’s second season, in 2022, deepened Nate’s story and pushed the series further into operatic territory, and Euphoria became a lightning rod for arguments about how television should depict adolescence, addiction and sexuality. Elordi’s work was central to those arguments. Nate gave audiences a way to talk about toxic masculinity that was neither a lecture nor a fantasy, and the actor was careful in interviews to separate himself from the character without disowning him.

After a long delay caused by strikes, rewrites and the rising careers of its cast, the third and final season arrived on HBO in April 2026 and ran until the end of May. It jumped forward in time, married Nate to Cassie Howard and then took him apart: a million-dollar debt to a loan shark, a ruined wedding night, a severed finger and toe, and finally a coffin in the ground. Nate died there, bitten by a rattlesnake before anyone could pay his ransom. Elordi called it “a cool way to go”, and later told Deadline that he suspected Levinson “brought me back to torture me”. He spent two days of filming locked in the coffin with a live snake. The season ended to mixed reviews, but it closed the chapter that had made him credible, seven years after it began.

Elvis, Felix and the year everything changed

By then the film career had long since overtaken the television one, and the turning point came in 2023, when two very different directors cast him in two very different films released within weeks of each other.

In Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla, he played Elvis Presley opposite Cailee Spaeny, who played the title role. The film, based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, tells the relationship from her side, and it is not flattering to the King: its Elvis is magnetic but also controlling, possessive and increasingly frightening to the teenage girl he brings to Graceland. Coppola said she chose Elordi for his magnetism and charisma. He prepared with documentaries and biographies and deliberately avoided watching Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis, which had earned Austin Butler an Oscar nomination only months earlier. Taking the same role so soon was a risk. Reviews of the film were mixed to positive, but his performance was widely praised for holding both the charm and the menace, and his height, six feet five inches, became part of the portrait: a giant looming over a girl who barely reaches his chest.

Then came Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a dark comedy about class and obsession that divided critics on release and then became a phenomenon once it reached streaming. Elordi played Felix Catton, the golden aristocratic Oxford student who invites Barry Keoghan‘s Oliver Quick to spend the summer at his family’s estate, with consequences Felix does not survive. It was a role that used his looks as bait: Felix is the object of everyone’s desire, including the camera’s, and Elordi played him with a careless warmth that made the film’s cruelty work. Critics called him a revelation and the film’s secret weapon. The performance brought his first BAFTA nomination, for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, along with a nomination for the BAFTA Rising Star Award.

Elordi also squeezed two smaller films into that period. He played a vain British film actor named Ian in Sean Price Williams’ indie odyssey The Sweet East, and a nineteen-year-old serial killer, Bobby Falls, in the road thriller He Went That Way, which he also executive produced. Taken together, the slate was a statement of intent: a real rock star, a fictional aristocrat, a narcissist and a murderer, none of them the boy next door. In January 2024 he hosted Saturday Night Live, an appearance that drew lukewarm reviews for sketches that leaned heavily on jokes about his height and his looks, the very things he had spent years trying to make secondary.

Schrader, Swift Horses and a war story from home

What followed was a run of work that looked less like a star building a brand than an actor collecting teachers. In Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, he played the young version of Leonard Fife, the dying documentary filmmaker portrayed in old age by Richard Gere. The film, adapted from Russell Banks’ novel Foregone, is a meditation on memory and self-mythology. Several critics pointed out that Elordi stands roughly half a foot taller than Gere, which made the casting hard to believe, and he acknowledged studying Gere’s mannerisms closely to bridge the gap.

On Swift Horses, directed by Daniel Minahan from Shannon Pufahl’s novel, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival the same year and reached cinemas in April 2025. Elordi played Julius, a restless gambler in 1950s California and Las Vegas who falls into a secret romance with a man named Henry, played by Diego Calva, while circling his brother’s wife, Muriel, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. He was also an executive producer. Screen Daily called it an electrifying performance and The Hollywood Reporter said it was his best work yet; the film itself found only a small audience.

The project that meant the most to him personally came from Australia. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a five-part series directed by Justin Kurzel from Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, cast him as Dorrigo Evans, a young surgeon who becomes a prisoner of war forced to work on the Thai-Burma railway during the Second World War. Ciarán Hinds played the older Dorrigo. The series premiered in April 2025, and Elordi, who had long spoken about wanting to make serious work at home, lost weight for the camp sequences and carried the drama with a gravity that surprised viewers who still thought of him as Nate Jacobs. It brought him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a limited series and the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actor in a Television Drama, his first major prize in his home country.

Becoming the Creature

If there was a single role that was supposed to test whether he was more than a beautiful face, it was the one that hid the face entirely. Guillermo del Toro had spent decades trying to make Frankenstein, and when Andrew Garfield withdrew from the part of the Creature because of scheduling conflicts, the director turned to Elordi, casting him opposite Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth.

The transformation was brutal. The prosthetics designer Mike Hill and his team built the Creature from forty-two separate silicone pieces covering Elordi’s face and body, and the application took around ten hours a day, with several people working on him at once and a portable sauna used to melt the pieces off at night. Elordi has said, surprisingly, that he found the process “incredibly liberating”: for the first time since he became famous, nobody on set was looking at him. He built the Creature’s movement and voice from the inside out, playing a being who learns language, tenderness and grief before the world teaches him hatred. He later said that the Creature he read in the script, in Australia, “was exactly how he came out onscreen”.

The film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in August 2025, where it received a long standing ovation, before a limited theatrical run in October and its Netflix release in November. Critics who disagreed about del Toro’s lavish approach largely agreed about Elordi. RogerEbert.com wrote that he was marvellous in conveying the monster’s intelligence, sensitivity and inherent gentleness, and the performance became the centre of a long awards campaign.

The campaign paid off in a way few had predicted two years earlier. He won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor, the AACTA International Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Saturn Award, and he was nominated at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA. In January 2026 the Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor, making him the first Gen Z actor ever nominated in that category and the first male actor of his generation nominated in any acting category. He had been asleep when the nominations were announced, having dozed off reading a book, and woke to his mother calling. “I am beside myself,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m 28 years old. It’s wind in the sails.”

At the ceremony on March 15, 2026, he kept the promise he had made at fifteen and brought Melissa Elordi as his date. The Oscar went to Sean Penn for One Battle After Another, but the nomination had already done what the teen films never could: it put his name on a list that no one could read as a verdict on his looks.

Heathcliff, and the argument about who gets to play him

A month earlier he had reached cinemas in a very different register. Emerald Fennell, reuniting with him after Saltburn, cast him as Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie‘s Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, her deliberately sensual, stylised take on Emily Brontë’s novel, released by Warner Bros. in February 2026 with a soundtrack by Charli XCX. Elordi had reportedly been planning a break from acting before Fennell offered him the part.

The casting was contested from the moment it was announced. In the novel Heathcliff is a foundling picked up on the streets of Liverpool and described as a “dark-skinned gipsy”, and many readers and scholars have long argued that he was not meant to be white. Critics of the film, including the director of the Brontë Writing Centre, said a white Australian star was the wrong choice for a role that is fundamentally about an outsider despised for his origins. Fennell defended her decision by saying that Elordi looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first copy of the book she ever read. The argument did not go away, and it is a fair criticism of a career that has been built, in part, on how Elordi looks.

Audiences did not wait for the debate to be settled. Wuthering Heights opened at number one in North America and went on to gross about 242 million dollars worldwide against an 80 million dollar budget, easily the biggest commercial success of Elordi’s film career. Reviews were mixed, with many critics admiring its visual intensity and questioning its fidelity, but the film confirmed something the industry had doubted: that the actor from the streaming romances could also sell a period drama to cinema audiences around the world.

The Dog Stars and the limits of a name

Then came the reminder that no run lasts for ever. In Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, adapted from Peter Heller’s post-apocalyptic novel and released in the United States at the end of August 2026, Elordi played Hig, a pilot living in an isolated airfield compound with a hard-bitten survivalist played by Josh Brolin, who sets out into a ruined world after hearing a mysterious radio transmission. Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce co-starred.

The film was one of the biggest disappointments of the late summer. It opened poorly and collapsed in its second weekend, finishing its theatrical run with a gross of roughly 39 million dollars against a reported production budget of between 70 and 110 million. Critics were cool, describing the film as handsome but listless, while audiences were noticeably kinder. Industry commentators used the result to ask whether Elordi could open a film on his own name without a famous novel, a famous co-star or a famous auteur behind him. It is a question every young leading man faces sooner or later, and one that The Dog Stars answered, for now, in the negative.

A heartthrob who keeps choosing to disappear

The contradiction at the heart of Elordi’s public image has not gone away; it has simply become more productive. He is still treated, in fashion pages and on social media, as a generational sex symbol, and he has not refused the role. He is a longtime ambassador for the Italian house Bottega Veneta, has fronted its campaigns, including a travel-themed series shot by the photographer Alec Soth, and was photographed in the front row of its Spring 2027 show in Milan in September 2026. He was the face of Boss The Scent in 2022 and has worked with the Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer. His habit of carrying handbags usually associated with womenswear, from the Fendi Baguette to Bottega Veneta’s Andiamo, has made him a reference point in conversations about how men dress.

And yet the roles he picks keep working against that image. Felix is a beautiful man seen through the eyes of someone who wants to consume him; Elvis is a beautiful man who controls a girl; Nate is a beautiful man who hurts people; the Creature is a man whose beauty has been removed altogether. It is possible to read this as vanity in reverse, an actor proving he is serious by hiding the thing he is famous for. It is also possible to read it as a consistent, almost stubborn argument with his own celebrity. Either way, the pattern is too regular to be accidental. He has also turned down parts that would have made him conventionally bigger, including, by his own account, an audition for Superman, which he felt was not right for him.

His private life has been harder to keep private. He has had public relationships with his Kissing Booth co-star Joey King, the model Kaia Gerber and Olivia Jade Giannulli, all followed obsessively by the celebrity press. There have also been episodes he did not choose: in 2023 he obtained a restraining order against a stalker, and in early 2024 police in Sydney examined an allegation that he had been involved in an altercation with a radio producer. He speaks about his family often and about his relationships rarely, which is its own kind of answer to the tabloid version of him.

What comes next

The next confirmed step is also the most demanding so far. Elordi is set to star alongside Lily-Rose Depp in Outer Dark, the first English-language film by László Nemes, the Hungarian director of Son of Saul, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s second novel. He will play Culla Holme, a man in Depression-era Appalachia who abandons the baby he has fathered with his own sister in the woods, and then tells her it died. Nemes wrote the script with his longtime collaborator Clara Royer, and filming is scheduled to begin in November 2026. It is hard to imagine a role further from Noah Flynn, and it sits squarely in the tradition he has chosen: a great director, a difficult book and a man the audience will struggle to like.

Beyond that, trade reports have placed him in talks to join Scarlett Johansson in Scapegoat, a thriller written and directed by Ari Aster for A24, though no deal has been confirmed. With Euphoria finished, there is no longer a television series to return to, which gives him more freedom than at any point since he was twenty-one.

An actor still arguing with his own face

Looked at from here, Jacob Elordi’s first decade on screen follows a clear line, even if it did not always feel planned. A working-class boy from Brisbane with a Basque father and a promise to his mother fell into global fame through a film he did not want to make, used that fame to reach Euphoria, used Euphoria to reach Coppola and Fennell, and used them to reach del Toro and an Oscar nomination. Along the way he learned how to make his looks serve a character instead of the other way round.

The weak points are real. His biggest hit came wrapped in a casting controversy that will follow it; his first attempt to lead a large original film on his own name failed; and the celebrity machine that he criticises still pays a good part of his bills through fashion and advertising. None of that cancels what he has built. It simply means the next few choices, starting with a Cormac McCarthy novel about sin and abandonment, will decide whether the Creature was the high point of a young career or the moment it truly began.

Elordi has always said that his dream was to be in the movies, not on the posters for them. At twenty-nine, with an Oscar nomination, a box-office hit, a flop and a finished television series behind him, he has more of both than he ever asked for. The more revealing fact is which one he keeps choosing.