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Jacob Elordi is Heathcliff. The 28-year-old Australian actor has scarcely been out of the headlines since his controversial casting in Emerald Fennell’s imminent adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Now, in the week of the film’s release, he’s being hailed as “the hottest man on the planet”, tipped as a future Oscar winner and household name. Not even mixed early reviews seem to be slowing the momentum.
Truly, these heights must seem wuthering to the boy from Brisbane who fell in love with acting after being cast as The Cat in The Hat. “As soon as I was singing and dancing with the big hat on, I knew that that was what I wanted to do,” Elordi said last December. But who is he, and what’s behind his rapid rise?
He’s a generation’s go-to crush …
Heathcliff might be Elordi’s highest-profile performance to date, but Gen Z has grown up with him on their screens and there’s a case to be made he’s their defining heart-throb. Elordi’s breakout role was in Netflix’s hugely popular Kissing Booth films, in which he played the teenage protagonist’s respectful older love interest Noah Flynn between 2018 and 2021. At the same time, Elordi starred in HBO’s edgy, sex-and-drugs teen drama Euphoria as toxic jock Nate Jacobs. The contrasting roles not only showcased Elordi’s range, but set him up to be a generational crush whether your tastes ran to good guys or bad boys. He is also, famously, 6ft 5in.
… but also a serious actor
Like Robert Pattinson with Twilight, Elordi has distanced himself from his breakout franchise, panning The Kissing Booth films as “ridiculous … [and] not universal”, while claiming he “didn’t want to make” them. (Elordi’s co-star – and former girlfriend – Joey King said his comments were “unfortunate”.) Again, like Pattinson, Elordi sought to shake off his teen pin-up image with dark, challenging roles, playing a serial killer in 2023’s He Went That Way and a murdered piano teacher in 2022’s erotic thriller Deep Water. Critics finally took note after Elordi was cast as Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. Coppola said Elordi and Elvis had a similar “effect on women”: “I mean, he’s striking – so tall.”
He’s not just tall. He can also read
Elordi’s last big role was playing Frankenstein’s monster in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film for Netflix – suggesting he’s still battling against the perception of him as really, really good-looking. Good luck, Jacob! Elordi’s appeal is not just that he’s tall, though that cannot be underestimated. He’s also deep, as evinced by his frequent name-checking of books. In an educational interview with Bustle in 2024, Elordi said he was an “enormous Kerouac fan”, a “huge Sartre fan”, that reading The Odyssey was a “massive joy” and he loved “Shakespeare more than anything”. Donna Tartt also got a look-in, with Elordi declaring of The Secret History: “I believe it to be her best work.” In the same interview, “a bespectacled” Elordi admitted to being “a Moleskine guy” and keeping a notebook for every character he played. He was also at work on some paintings, though he demurred from showing or even describing them to the interviewer: “I worry I might jeopardise what I get out of them.” Paparazzi pictures of Elordi browsing airport bookshops – and, once, carrying a paperback in the lower pocket of his cargo pants – have sent social media into a frenzy. (“I am going feral,” commented one X user.) If you were being churlish, you could infer that Elordi is the archetypal “performative male” – an archetype widely mocked on social media for their pretentious cultural signalling – but it seems being really, really good-looking gives you a pass.
… and he’s Australian!
Also central to Elordi’s appeal is that he is not American, having been born in Brisbane and grown up between there and Melbourne. As such, he is a breath of fresh air in Hollywood. Elordi himself has stressed the cultural differences. “If Australians are like freshwater fish, Americans are saltwater fish,” he told GQ in 2023. “It kind of looks the same. The water is water, you’re swimming around, but you can’t breathe.” He gave the example of ordering a coffee, “like a standoff” in Los Angeles compared to the “sacred”, easy “mateship” of Australia. That’s not to say it’s always been smooth sailing down under. “From the moment I did a play I was called gay at school,” Elordi said in a different interview. He rose above it, he added. “I was never worried that my peers would think I was less than a man … I’m spending my weekends with the most beautiful women from the school next door, reading the most romantic words ever written.”
He has a complicated relationship with fame
As much as Elordi has striven to be known for his work and love of literature, he hasn’t been able to dodge the shabby world of celebrity entirely. In the past he’s been romantically linked to his Euphoria co-star Zendaya, Cindy Crawford’s model daughter Kaia Gerber and Olivia Jade, the YouTuber who was infamously involved in the 2019 US college admissions scandal. The scrutiny of his personal life and “new-world version of fame … can pain Elordi,” as the GQ interviewer put it. Elordi earned two Bafta nominations for his star-making turn as Felix, a young aristocrat, in Fennell’s 2023 film Saltburn, but his performance was overshadowed by a scene in which Barry Keoghan’s character lustfully drinks Felix’s bathwater. The online furore inspired bootleg merchandise including “Jacob Elordi’s bathwater” and Lush’s “salty, milky” bath bomb. Elordi laughed it off on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, but was later involved in an “incident” with an Australian radio producer who filmed himself asking Elordi for his bathwater. When the man refused to delete the footage, Elordi allegedly pushed him against the wall and grabbed his throat. Police were reported to be investigating the incident in February 2024, but nothing’s come of it since.
Now he’s Heathcliff
Given the scrutiny he received after Saltburn, Elordi has admitted to having second thoughts about returning to Fennell for Wuthering Heights. “Saltburn grew into this thing I didn’t really plan for,” he told Vogue Australia. “There is this feeling of having to swing for the fences again.” By all accounts, Wuthering Heights only dials up the social media bait and over-the-top eroticism, with the first half of the film described as “essentially 60 minutes of foreplay”. His co-star and fellow Australian Margot Robbie has certainly been keen to emphasise Elordi as a draw, describing the screening she threw for her friends as “the most unhinged experience” of her life”.
Photograph: AP
“Twenty women were like frothing at the mouth,” she told to Jimmy Kimmel. “They were like rabid dogs … when Jacob came on screen, I think it registered on the Richter scale; they screamed so loud.” Later pressed for his response to this anecdote, Elordi hedged (“I don’t know. What do you say to that?”) before eventually allowing that Robbie and her friends were “intense”. Elordi was a controversial choice for Heathcliff, not least because the character is stated in Emily Brontë’s novel to have dark skin. Fennell defended her casting by saying that Elordi “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. But even Elordi, it seems, was not immediately convinced. He told Vogue Australia that, for the first three weeks of making the film, he felt “the greatest amount of doubt” he had experienced thus far in his career. “It was the first time I’d been like, ‘I don’t know if I’m good enough’.” His breakthrough came when he realised that he was holding on to the character “so tightly”, Elordi continued. “Like, it’s Heathcliff. It has to be Heathcliff.” Well, sure. The question is, will audiences let him in?
