By Yasmin Omar
We can’t help falling in love with Jacob Elordi. And the characters he plays know it. The mere suggestion of his affection is enough to drive Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie to the brink of mental collapse in Euphoria (2019–) – despite her claims she’s ‘never, ever been happier!’ – and Barry Keoghan’s Oliver to lap up his semen-tainted bathwater in Saltburn (2023). In fact, the centripetal force of Elordi’s charisma is how he got the part of the Elvis Presley in Priscilla, since his first meeting with writer-director Sofia Coppola had everyone around them angling towards him like moths to a flame, as they do everywhere he goes. (The opening sentence of his recent GQ profile sums it up best: ‘The girls are hyperventilating.’)
Off screen, Jacob Elordi is the lanky golden boy with the little handbag, telling fans who call him beautiful that they are too. On it, in his breakout TV and film roles, it’s another story. Sam Levinson’s flashy, glitter-encrusted HBO show Euphoria, with its music-video aesthetic, doesn’t have all that much in common with Coppola’s beautifully restrained biopic Priscilla – save for a throwaway Euphoria line about Elvis’ drug problem.
