Euphoria is a show about high school in the way that Drive to Survive is a show about cars. The kids of East Highland High are doing what most of us did as teens—pushing boundaries—but they’re just doing it to the extreme, with a lot more opiates and underboob. It’s thrilling and panic inducing at the same time, and that’s largely because creator Sam Levinson’s neon-and-glitter aesthetic captures just how intense and dramatic high school can feel. Only, it’s even more intense now. For this generation, the anxiety you once felt walking into the cafeteria—that sense of figuring out who you are while everyone’s watching—follows you everywhere there’s Wi-Fi. Euphoria is a show about constructing your identity in a very online world—and the painful process of closing the gap between who you are and who you want to be.
One of his roles involved playing Oberon, the King of the Fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was excited, he tells me, for the chance to fashion an Oberon that transgressed conventional gender lines. He wore a leather jacket and rings on his fingers. “When they said I was gay, I remember leaning into the makeup,” Elordi says. He wore purple glitter on his face, and spiked hair with pink stripes. “I was like, if I’m going to be the King of the Fairies, I’m going to be the f*cking hottest King of the Fairies you’ve ever seen.” The experience was transformative. “I started welcoming those kinds of characters. I started welcoming the femininity. I started speaking with my hands. I started really playing the thespian.”
Eric Dane, who plays Nate Jacobs’s father, Cal, recognized in Elordi a veteran’s ability to handle those long days. “There’s a level of focus that you maintain throughout the day, so that you can stay at that low boil, and keep delivering the performance over and over again—and he has that,” Dane tells me over the phone. “He has this gregarious charm and we goof around a lot, but he’s always focused, and he’s always prepared.”
To get into the mindset of Nate Jacobs, Elordi took himself to a gym where TikTokers trained, watching how those kids walked around and talked to girls, what songs made them beat their chest. (“A lot of Pop Smoke,” he says.) And, because Nate can be a predatory maniac, he turned to a very specific source of inspiration: documentaries about sharks. “Nate is always watching,” he says. “He’ll bump into someone in the hallway, like a shark when they test someone’s leg—and then he comes up from the deep and just f*cking annihilates them.”
Elordi even took this level of intensity to his preparation for The Kissing Booth, an approach that, in hindsight, he admits was a bit absurd. The movie was based on a Y.A. novel that the actor read like a sacred text, and when he noticed discrepancies between the script and the source material, he sounded the alarm. “I remember saying, He smokes in the book. I need to smoke. He needs to have cigarettes. He’s a bad boy.” He was informed that, unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. “I was like, This is bullsh*t! I remember going to war for it. I was like, Are we lying to the f*cking millions of 14-year-olds out there? This guy smokes nicotine. It says here on page four—look! I imagine people were just like, ‘Jesus f*cking Christ. Is this guy serious?’ ”
The thing is, Elordi is serious when it comes to acting. “For me,” he says, “acting is breathing.” If Elordi often talks ponderously about “process” and “craft,” it’s because acting in film and theater—and studying great stars of the stage and screen—has been his only real education. “I didn’t finish university, I barely finished high school,” Elordi says. “All I know is from the books I’ve read, and the plays that I’ve read.”
Zachary Quinto, who appears alongside Elordi in the forthcoming thriller He Went That Way, was particularly struck by the books Elordi would carry around with him. “It was a lot of philosophy, I feel like there might’ve been a Nietzsche,” he says. It suggested to Quinto someone with a depth beyond his years. “I don’t think a lot of people Jacob’s age would necessarily be classifiable as seekers. There’s a real sense of intellectual curiosity that probably belies his age. We live in a time which is so defined by social media and by, you know, more frivolous pursuits than Nietzsche.”
Elordi ties his interest in acting back to his early discovery of books, which expanded his imagination and helped him tap into a fuller spectrum of human emotion. “Someone has said that every human being is capable of murder,” he tells me, “and I like to think of that a lot when I’m acting. It’s always there, it’s in your bones, every single piece of grief or loss or happiness or sadness you feel in your life is there. It’s just figuring out how to get to it.”
Particularly bothersome to Elordi were certain theories on dark corners of the internet, speculations that he was calling the paparazzi to direct attention to himself. On the set of Deep Water, he sought advice from his costar Ben Affleck, himself no stranger to the tabloids. What Affleck told him, as he recalls it, wasn’t exactly reassuring. The worst part, Affleck said, is that in certain bleak moments you start feeling like a phony. You start wondering whether maybe you really did want the paparazzi to catch that snapshot of you. Elordi worries that the media attention will become so disorienting that he’ll numb a part of himself to make moving through Hollywood smoother. He fears that some of his life force will go out, that he’ll be reduced to the handsome face on a billboard.
Elordi has had a rule book—up until now. But he’s getting to a point where the confidence that’s buoyed him his entire life is running up against a swell of celebrity he isn’t totally sure how to navigate.
