Jacob Elordi (born 1997) is the Australian actor who played the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, earning an Oscar nomination.
Quick Specs
| Born | Jacob Nathaniel Elordi, June 26, 1997, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia |
| Height | 6 feet 5 inches, by his own account |
| Breakthrough | Noah Flynn in The Kissing Booth (2018) |
| Television | Nate Jacobs in Euphoria (2019 to 2026); Dorrigo Evans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2025) |
| Horror | Jake Matthews in The Mortuary Collection (2019); the Creature in Frankenstein (2025) |
| Also | Elvis Presley in Priscilla (2023); Felix Catton in Saltburn (2023); Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (2026) |
| Frankenstein awards | Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor; Critics’ Choice Award winner |
| Earlier nominations | BAFTA Supporting Actor and EE Rising Star (2024, Saltburn year); Golden Globe for The Narrow Road to the Deep North |
Who He Is
Jacob Nathaniel Elordi was born in Brisbane on June 26, 1997, the youngest child of John Elordi, a house painter, and Melissa Elordi, a stay-at-home mother and school volunteer, in a working-class household with older sisters. His father was born in Markina-Xemein in the Basque Country and migrated to Australia from Bilbao at eight.
He spent his first 12 years in Brisbane, moved to Melbourne in 2010 for four years while a sister attended the Australian Ballet School, and came back to Brisbane in 2013, at 16, to finish school, graduating from St Joseph’s College, Nudgee, in 2015 after time at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne. Sport came first. He represented Victoria in rugby union and basketball and was on a Victorian under-16 basketball team that won the national championship in 2012. But from 12 he was also doing school musicals, Seussical and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and he played Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A rugby back injury ended the athletic path, and after a year at an acting school in Melbourne he went after acting.
He has named Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight as the performance that made him want to act. At 14 he started practising an American accent, modelling it on Vin Diesel. At 15, when modelling was suggested, he was told he was too tall for the sample clothes, the first of many times his height was held against him. He moved to the United States in 2017, at 19.
The Work, and What He Did in It
His first time on a set was as an uncredited extra on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, filmed in Australia. His first acting role was Rooster in the Australian film Swinging Safari (2018).
Fame came with Netflix’s The Kissing Booth (2018), opposite Joey King, which premiered in May 2018, when he was 20. Reviews were mostly negative, but it became one of Netflix’s most-watched titles of the year. He played Noah Flynn, the bad-boy jock love interest, and returned for The Kissing Booth 2 (2020) and The Kissing Booth 3 (2021). In 2023 he said he had not wanted to make the sequels and called them “ridiculous,” saying an actor in his position did what he had to in order to work in the United States.
He spent that heartthrob capital on something darker. In Sam Levinson’s HBO series Euphoria (2019) he played Nate Jacobs, an abusive father’s son and a high-school football star he has himself described as “a narcissist” and “a sociopath.” He gave the show’s most frightening character stillness, size and menace instead of charm. He played Nate from the 2019 pilot through the third and final season, which aired in April 2026. In between came his first horror credit, Jake Matthews in the anthology The Mortuary Collection (2019), along with 2 Hearts (2020), The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020) and Deep Water (2022).
In 2023, at 26, he released two films that changed how he was cast. In Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which premiered at Venice, he played Elvis Presley from inside Priscilla Presley’s story (Cailee Spaeny in the title role): not the concert myth but the domineering, pill-shadowed private man. Critic Richard Lawson praised how he “carefully calibrates Elvis’s appeal and his pill-addled, domineering presence.” Coppola said she cast him partly for his effect on women at their first meeting, which she found comparable to Elvis’s; Elordi said he was initially wary of the singing and dancing but wanted to work with Coppola. In Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which premiered at Telluride and opened the BFI London Film Festival, he is Felix Catton, the wealthy, magnetic Oxford student whose family estate becomes the trap for Barry Keoghan’s Oliver. Critic Nicholas Barber called him “a revelation,” and he was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor and the EE Rising Star Award. He also made The Sweet East and He Went That Way that year.
The prestige run continued: the young Leonard Fife, the younger self of Richard Gere’s character, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (2024); Julius, a gambler in 1950s Las Vegas, in On Swift Horses, which one critic called “his best performance yet”; and Dorrigo Evans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2025), the miniseries of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel, which earned a Golden Globe nomination.
Frankenstein (2025) is the horror centrepiece. Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed it for Netflix from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, with Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Christoph Waltz as Henrich Harlander. Elordi plays the Creature. He was not the first choice. Andrew Garfield was cast first and left in January 2024 because the strike-related postponements had created scheduling conflicts, and earlier, before Netflix revived the project, del Toro’s Creature in a Universal-era version had been his frequent collaborator Doug Jones. Prosthetics chief Mike Hill, who had spent months designing the Creature for a different actor, rebuilt the design around Elordi. Del Toro’s reason for the casting, at Venice: “Jacob’s eyes are so full of humanity. I cast him because of his eyes.” The film was shot from February to September 2024.
What Elordi did starts with the body. Del Toro’s brief to Hill ruled out crude stitch-work: the Creature was “not a repair job… a newly minted man.” The full-body version, the nearly naked newborn Creature, used 42 silicone prosthetic appliances across head and body and took up to 10 hours, with the makeup call at midnight; the dressed, face-and-hands version ran about four and a half hours. “And he never complained once,” Hill said. Hill has said the full application was done 56 times over the shoot, and makeup artist Jordan Samuel said Elordi stood for four to five of those hours.
Then the movement. At del Toro’s suggestion he built the Creature’s physicality from butoh, the Japanese dance form concerned with death and reanimation, and added study of how babies develop and of the innocent movement of his own golden retriever. He has described the physical arc as a life cycle: born “nearly nothing… chest open, head high,” then, with pain, the shoulders hunching “as we do as a teenager,” until as an adult “he closes off.” The result is a Creature built on stillness, eyes and a newborn’s body rather than bolts and lumbering, intelligent and gentle before the world teaches it otherwise.
The film premiered in competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025, to a reported 13-minute standing ovation, when Elordi was 28. It opened in limited theatres on October 17, 2025, and streamed globally on Netflix from November 7, 2025, running 149 minutes. One critic found him “marvelous in conveying the monster’s intelligence, sensitivity, and inherent gentleness,” and another called the performance “transformative.” He was nominated for the Oscar, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and won the Critics’ Choice Award in that category.
Since then he has played Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, released by Warner Bros. on February 13, 2026, and led Ridley Scott’s science-fiction film The Dog Stars, released August 26, 2026.
Cool Verified Facts
- He spent his early career pretending to be shorter. Told he was too tall to be cast, he passed for 6 foot 2 or 6 foot 3. “I’m actually 6’5″,” he said. The trait the industry tried to discount became the Creature’s silhouette: Hill cites Elordi’s gangliness, his limbs and his “doe-like eyes” as why he fit the rebuilt design.
- He had two Golden Globe nominations in the same season, for Frankenstein and The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
- Two of his biggest films, Saltburn and Wuthering Heights, are for the same director, Emerald Fennell.
- He played Elvis in Priscilla, opposite Cailee Spaeny. Austin Butler’s Elvis (2022) is a different film.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
By his own oft-told account, he was broke and couch-surfing in Los Angeles, his visa running out, when he helped a friend film an audition tape for Euphoria and then auditioned himself as a last throw before going home to Australia. He got Nate.
On the Frankenstein shoot he lost track of time: “You throw time away when you make a film like this. I stopped having a clock… It was just one time.” He tells a story about his golden retriever, Layla, who was with him in Toronto during preparation and on set, unbothered by the makeup: the two of them touched noses with a spark of static, and “she gave me life.”
His own summary of the role, at Venice: “It was a vessel I could put every part of myself into… the creature on screen is the purest form of myself. He’s more me than I am.”
Andrew Garfield has been gracious about losing the part. He said he was disappointed, called meeting Elordi “serendipitous,” said Elordi “maybe needed that experience more,” and joked about being spared six or seven hours in the prosthetics chair each morning.
He is candid about his own career. Few franchise leads disown the vehicle that made them; Elordi did, on the record, and the choices since, Coppola, Fennell, Schrader, del Toro, read as a deliberate counter-programme.
Why He Matters
For horror, Jacob Elordi is the modern face of the Creature. The role Boris Karloff defined in Frankenstein (1931) now has a defining 21st-century performance, Oscar-nominated and built on eyes, stillness and a newborn’s physicality. He was not the first choice, and the film’s reception still centred on him: the cleanest recent case of a late casting change shaping a film’s identity.
He also completed the heartthrob escape in public: Kissing Booth fame, then Nate Jacobs’s menace, then Elvis and Felix in one season, then the Creature, each step spending the previous image rather than repeating it. At 29, with an Oscar nomination behind him, he is the template for how a streaming teen star becomes a prestige actor, and his horror credit is the one that will last.