Jacob Elordi landed Euphoria on what he planned as his last audition
Broke, sleeping in his car at times and with his US visa running out, Jacob Elordi was helping a friend tape an audition for Euphoria when he decided to try for it himself, intending to fly home to Australia if it failed. He got the part of Nate Jacobs.
Elordi was born in Brisbane on 26 June 1997, the youngest of four children of a stay-at-home mother and a house painter. His father had come to Australia aged eight from Bilbao, leaving Francoist Spain; the family roots lie in the Basque town of Markina-Xemein. For four years the family lived in Melbourne while one of his sisters studied at the Australian Ballet School, and there Elordi played basketball for Victoria, winning an under-16 national title in 2012.
A back injury in a school rugby match pushed him toward the stage. He had been in musicals since twelve, and reading Waiting for Godot in a drama class at fifteen, he later said, made acting his church. Heath Ledger's Joker was the performance that first made him want to act. He copied Vin Diesel to learn an American accent, was turned away from modelling for being too tall for sample clothes, and moved to the United States at 19. His first taste of a Hollywood set was as an extra in a Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Netflix's The Kissing Booth (2018) made him famous despite poor reviews; he later told GQ he had not wanted to make the films and resented being objectified. Euphoria changed how he was seen, with critics treating his volatile football player as a breakout. Sofia Coppola cast him as Elvis in Priscilla partly because of the effect he had on people at their first meeting, and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn (2023) brought a BAFTA nomination.
Standing 1.95 metres, he was once criticised for looking nothing like the shorter Richard Gere, whose younger self he played in Oh, Canada. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025), in which he played the Creature, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His Heathcliff in Fennell's Wuthering Heights grossed 242 million dollars worldwide, the first large commercial hit of his career.
Source: Jacob Elordi
