A 28-year-old Australian actor, once best known for playing a brooding high school bad boy in a Netflix rom-com, is now collecting Critics’ Choice Awards, racking up Oscar nominations, and opening films to nearly $80 million worldwide. That is not the typical Hollywood story.
Most actors who get swallowed by the teen heartthrob machine never find their way out. Jacob Elordi not only found the exit, but he also blew the door off.
In the span of just a few years, he has worked with Sofia Coppola, Emerald Fennell, and Guillermo del Toro, played Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie, and landed a Ridley Scott sci-fi epic dropping this August.
The question is not whether Jacob Elordi is a serious actor anymore. The question is how fast he got here, and whether anyone saw it coming.
Arriving in LA with almost nothing — the early grind
Jacob Elordi was born on June 26, 1997, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the youngest child in a close-knit family. His father painted houses for a living. There was no industry connection, no Hollywood relative, no safety net waiting across the Pacific.
He studied at St. Kevin’s College in Melbourne and St. Joseph’s College in Brisbane, where he played rugby until he broke a bone in his back during a match. That injury pushed him away from athletics and toward acting. From that moment, something shifted. He started reading biographies of actors obsessively. He drew inspiration from Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Heath Ledger. These were not casual influences. They were his entire blueprint.
At 19, he packed up and moved to Los Angeles. He attended an acting school in Melbourne before heading to the US, and the school had a rule preventing students from auditioning while still enrolled. Elordi secretly rented theater spaces and stayed up late shooting self-tapes. When the school discovered his rule-breaking and asked him to leave, he booked The Kissing Booth the following Friday. That timing was not luck. It was relentless, stubborn preparation meeting its moment.
The Kissing Booth Trap That Became a Launchpad
Most actors in Elordi’s position would have cashed in and coasted. Netflix wanted more. The audience wanted more. The money was there, the franchise was there, and the path of least resistance was obvious.
The Kissing Booth sequels in 2020 and 2021 allowed Elordi to refine the role and learn a great deal about balancing commercial opportunities with personal goals, as well as audience connection and on-screen presence. He was playing the long game. Every interview from that era shows a young actor quietly studying the machinery of fame, not getting consumed by it.
What followed next shocked everyone who had filed him under “Netflix teen heartthrob” and moved on.
Euphoria and the Turn Nobody Saw Coming
Nate Jacobs is one of the most genuinely disturbing characters in recent television history. Controlling, violent, psychologically fractured, and impossible to look away from. It was not the obvious next move for someone who just spent three films being likeable on a motorbike.
Elordi cemented his stardom with the HBO drama Euphoria, which ran from 2019 to 2026, and though the role established him as a teen heartthrob, he had voiced concerns about objectification and about whether he would be accepted as a serious actor. Nate Jacobs was his answer to those concerns. Playing a villain this layered required a level of psychological commitment that the rom-com genre does not demand.
The performance forced critics to recalibrate. Hollywood took notice. Suddenly, the doors being knocked on were very different doors.
Saltburn, Priscilla, On Swift Horses — building the auteur filmography
In 2023, Elordi did something almost no actor manages: he released two critically acclaimed films in the same awards season and came out of both with his reputation elevated.
He starred as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla, which told the story of the rock singer’s courtship of and marriage to Priscilla Presley. Elordi did extensive research on the King of Rock and Roll, and his dark and complex performance was praised by critics and Priscilla Presley herself. That last detail matters enormously. When the real person validates your portrayal, the argument is settled.
Then came Saltburn. As Felix Catton in Emerald Fennell’s black comedy, Elordi avoided the stereotypical received pronunciation normally used by non-Brits tackling the upper class, instead perfectly finding the cadence and melody of a posh boy from the mid-2000s. The film became a cultural moment, spawning thousands of TikToks and one of the most talked-about closing sequences in recent cinema history. Elordi himself acknowledged on SNL that most people recognised him not from seeing the film, but just from seeing the TikToks.
On Swift Horses, a 1950s-set queer love story, followed. Elordi described it as “a sprawling, epic, non-generic love story,” and noted that the theme is “entirely universal for every single person on the planet.” It was another deliberate choice to work in morally complex, less commercially safe territory. The pattern was becoming undeniable.
Frankenstein and the Oscar Nomination That Changed Everything
When Guillermo del Toro wanted Elordi for Frankenstein, the timeline alone might have made the job feel impossible. Elordi was filming in Australia when the call came in and had just about three weeks between wrapping that project and arriving on del Toro’s set in Toronto. But even with the clock ticking, he jumped at the opportunity to work with someone he described as “one of the greatest artists of the last century.”
The result was extraordinary. Del Toro was given around $120 million by Netflix to bring his vision to life, and the film was described as fully immersive, unique, and absolutely breathtaking. The emotional depth of the film was credited largely to Elordi’s performance as the Creature.
For his role as the Creature, Elordi had to undergo the application of 42 prosthetic pieces and countless hours of preparation in what became one of the most technically challenging roles of his career.
He won the 2026 Critics’ Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor, and his acceptance speech was unscripted. “Bloody hell. I really didn’t plan for it,” he said at the podium. That lack of preparation was genuine. The award was a surprise even to him.
When his Oscar nomination was announced, Elordi told The Hollywood Reporter: “I am beside myself. I am so excited. I mean, I’m 28 years old. It’s wind in the sails.” The nomination placed him alongside Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Stellan Skarsgard, and Delroy Lindo. Not bad company for a man who once played a high school bad boy on Netflix.
Wuthering Heights as Heathcliff — the $76M gamble that worked
Casting Elordi as Heathcliff was controversial from the moment it was announced. Brontë fans were vocal about the fact that Heathcliff is described as dark-skinned in the novel, and that racist abuse by his adopted family is a major plot point in the story. The debate was real and the criticism was pointed.
Director Emerald Fennell held firm. Warner Bros. backed the vision. And the audience showed up.
With Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Elordi as Heathcliff, Fennell’s film opened with an estimated $34.8 million domestically alongside $42 million internationally for a $76.8 million opening weekend start. The film surpassed $240 million at the global box office.
Sales of Brontë’s novel in the United States more than doubled in 2025 compared with the previous year, reaching 180,000 print copies, while the United Kingdom saw a 469% increase with over 10,670 copies sold in January 2026 compared to 1,875 in January 2025. The controversy did not damage the film. It made it unmissable.
The reviews were divided, but no one questioned Elordi’s commitment to the role. He threw himself into a film that many expected to fail and helped turn it into a genuine cultural event.
The Dog Stars with Ridley Scott — what comes next
Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars is set to hit theatres on August 28, 2026. The film is based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel and adapted by Mark L. Smith, whose previous work includes The Revenant and Twisters. Elordi plays Hig, a pilot who survived a catastrophic virus but lost his wife, and who must navigate a brutal post-apocalyptic world alongside a military survivalist played by Josh Brolin. Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce also star.
The project was originally going to feature Paul Mescal in the lead role, before Elordi took over after Mescal stepped away due to scheduling conflicts with the Sam Mendes Beatles biopics. Elordi stepping into a Ridley Scott film at the last minute and still delivering is, at this point, entirely on brand.
By working with Scott, Elordi continues his streak with A-list directors, a streak that now includes Coppola, Fennell, del Toro, and Scott within a three-year window. That list is not an accident. It reflects a very deliberate approach to every choice he makes.
The philosophy behind every role he accepts or refuses
Elordi has been consistent in interviews about what he looks for. He is drawn to complexity, to characters who demand full psychological investment, to directors who see cinema as an art form rather than a product. He turned down Superman when it was offered to him. “They asked me to read for Superman. That was immediately, ‘No, thank you.’ That’s too much. That’s too dark for me,” he said, an answer that reveals everything about how he thinks about scale versus substance.
In a candid moment during the Saltburn press run, Elordi said, “It means the world to me that they let me make movies. My God, I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. Every night I go to bed, and I’m like, ‘No way.'” There is something in that statement that cuts through the Oscar nominations and the box office numbers. He has not forgotten where he started, and that groundedness is likely why directors keep trusting him with their most ambitious work.
From a broken rugby injury in Brisbane to an Oscar nomination at 28, Jacob Elordi’s career timeline is one of the most quietly remarkable in recent Hollywood history. He did not stumble into a prestige cinema. He studied his way in, worked his way up, and then refused to stop once he arrived.
The Dog Stars drops in August. After everything he has already done, the real question is what the conversation looks like in another three years.
