Jacob Elordi was set to reprise his breakout role in Euphoria, but as the world began shutting down, instead he holed up in Brisbane and turned to his own artistic pursuits.
For the past couple of months, the Australian actor Jacob Elordi has been growing a mullet.“It is luscious,” the 23-year-old confirms from the front porch of his parents’ home in Brisbane, where he is currently staying. We were speaking over video call – this was mid-May and no one was travelling anywhere – but Elordi’s hair was no less striking in virtual form. Neat on top and pushed away from his forehead, the back was threatening to reach his shoulders; not quite the full ’80s Billy Ray Cyrus, but getting there. “It is a huge sense of freedom,” says Elordi, running his hand through it. “Usually I have this all-American short back and sides, but I hate that haircut. I hate having super-short hair. So this is the first time I’ve been able to grow it.”
The mullet, for all its overtones of a certain kind of Australiana, speaks of something else. Namely, that Elordi is not where he should be: on a set somewhere in LA, filming the second season of acclaimed HBO series Euphoria.
“I was supposed to start shooting, but shit was starting to get weird in LA,” he says, referring to the first rumblings of what would become a global pandemic. “And the last place on Earth I want to be when shit gets weird is America, so I booked a ticket and dipped out.”
Elordi and the rest of the young cast – including Zendaya, Maude Apatow, Hunter Schafer and Algee Smith – had been hoping things would go ahead, but on the day they were due to start filming, he received a phone call. Production was shutting down – indefinitely.
Elordi had not been following the news and was unaware of how the pandemic was developing, but the fact filming had stopped told him everything he needed to know: it was bad.
“The reality for me was that it was large enough to stop production, which is a huge thing – movies will keep going even if there’s a civil war,” he laughs. “So that’s how crazy it was.”
Read the full article at Australian GQ
