Fame can eat you alive if you let it. That is one of the lessons of the acclaimed new series Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's a lesson its star, Jacob Elordi, has had to learn the hard way.
“You feel like an impostor,” Elordi tells The National. “You’re met with this public idea of who you are, and it’s never going to reflect who you actually are.
“Playing this role taught me that it's better to talk about it than bury it down for the entirety of your life.”
The Australian actor, 27, has grappled with a lot in his rise to superstardom. He rocketed to fame in 2018 Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, following that up a year later with the phenomenal HBO series Euphoria. By the time Saltburn hit Amazon Prime Video in 2023, he was seemingly all anyone could talk about.
The world saw his talent, to be sure, but things also got weird. He wasn’t being treated as a great actor – only as a heart-throb. Increasingly, it seemed that fans and journalists alike couldn’t separate him from the image built by his films and series.
Perhaps that’s why he saw so much of himself in Dorrigo Evans, the lead character of Narrow Road to the Deep North, now streaming on Tod and airing on BeIN TV channels in the Middle East. Dorrigo, just as he was in the Booker Prize-winning Richard Flanagan novel on which the series is based, is stoic – tormented by the divide between his public perception as a war hero and his true self that he keeps hidden inside.
“I felt it in my bones when I first read the book. He felt like a culmination of myself,” says Elordi.
But unlike Dorrigo, Elordi isn’t going to let the world tell him who he is. He’s an actor – and a serious one at that. And while films such as Priscilla gave a hint at what’s to come, Narrow Road is the start of his intentional ascent to being one of the best actors of his generation.
“I’ve grown up as a man of movies, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way. I love movies so much,” says Elordi.
Narrow Road is also a homecoming. It’s his first Australian lead role since moving to Los Angeles in 2017 to pursue his acting career. That’s part of why he takes the role so personally. It’s not just himself he sees in the character – it’s the world he left behind.
“There’s this unspoken Australian thing I recognised here. There’s so much of my dad in Dorrigo – this stoic Australian man – and all the men I grew up with. It’s hard to put it into words – it’s just something that’s in our bones when you’re born here,” Elordi says.
When series director and co-creator Justin Kurtzel (Snowtown, The Order) approached Elordi for the role, he wasn’t exactly sure what Elordi was about. He knew he was talented, but he had no idea how much Elordi cared about his craft – and cared about his homeland.
Kurtzel says: “In our first conversation, we talked a lot about Australia and being back here, and our love of Australian film.
“I was really impressed with his curiosity. He just felt like a serious actor who was deeply interested in the craft. He came at everything from that perspective rather than another one,” Kurtzel continues.
The more you get to know Elordi, the more you find he is truly a student of the game. He’s an avid subscriber to the Criterion Channel – a streaming service dedicated to classic and contemporary arthouse cinema – and calls the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman “the greatest actor of all time”.
In addition to reading the novel over and over, Elordi did a lot of digging into the history of film to prep for Narrow Road. In the series, his character is captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Burma railway, leading him to revisit classics that tread similar terrain.
“There’s so much cinema. There’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and Bridge Over the River Kwai. There’s a lot of great collections on Criterion, too – particularly pre- and post-World War Two Japanese cinema. There’s a tonne of poetry and a great book called Behind Bamboo too – it may not be popular media, but this was all really helpful to me,” says Elordi.
For Kurtzel, much of filming Narrow Road was about getting out of the way and letting the performances of Elordi and his co-stars dominate.
“We wanted it to feel alive,” says Kurtzel. “We shot hand-held for very, very long takes, and it was to try to make the actors feel as though they were kings on set, and we were just there to follow them. A lot of the energy of the show came from what they were giving us.”
And when Elordi returned to Hollywood afterwards, he did so as a changed man. He deactivated his Instagram in November 2024 with more than 13 million followers – seemingly unthinkable in an era in which social media fame dictates someone’s perceived value to film executives – and he’s chugging headfirst into the next era of his career.
Without the distractions that come with managing his public persona, Elordi is thriving. He’ll star as Frankenstein’s Monster in Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Hig in Ridley Scott’s upcoming The Dog Stars, based on the bestselling novel.
“Now I have the freedom to make them on a regular basis and hopefully make good ones,” says Elordi. “It’s a dream come true.”
BeIN Media Group is the rights holder of Narrow Road to the Deep North in the Mena region
