The 24-year-old ‘Euphoria’ actor has a hot show, a new film, and a reputation as a Gen-Z sex symbol. His star is on the rise, and he’s glad. Kind of. Maybe.
Some guys are method actors. Jacob Elordi is a method lifter.

TO PREPARE for the upcoming second season of HBO’s Euphoria, on which he plays an amoral high school quarterback, Elordi, 24, headed to a gym he prefers not to name, an exclusive luxury ab bunker in Los Angeles popular among You-Tubers, TikTok teens, and other wretches of the hype milieu who, invariably, train shirtless.

“I would never train shirtless,” Elordi says in his thick Australian accent, “but from day dot, I would just rip my shirt off and have, like, headphones on, playing Rage Against the Machine. I was trying to understand this mentality of what it is to be in the gym and look at yourself in the mirror and be like, Faaaack, I look good.”

This is not Elordi’s typical vibe. When we meet at a Blue Bottle Coffee in Malibu, he seems to be trying very hard not to be seen. He’s tied an expensive-looking floral scarf around the lower half of his face, and he is wearing large black sunglasses. His pants and jacket are loose and Carhartt-y. Between his height—he’s six-foot-five—his partly obscured face, and his baggy clothes, he gives the impression of several children stacked on one another’s shoulders, disguised as a grown man. It is immediately clear to all in this Blue Bottle that he is an incognito famous person.

The Malibuans who do recognize him, by his thick brows, maybe, would likely be surprised that he does not often think, Faaaack, I look good—that Jacob Elordi is not as obsessed with Jacob Elordi’s body as everyone else is.

Right now he’s more preoccupied with being noticed for something besides his pecs, his height, his out-of-this-world jawline, and his dating life (until recently he was with Kaia Gerber—yes, Cindy Crawford’s daughter). He’d like to be noticed for his work, for instance. Beyond starring in Euphoria’s second season, premiering on January 9, Elordi will appear alongside Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas in Deep Water later this year, a film based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith and coadapted by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson.

But Elordi gets it: He stands out. He towers over everyone in Blue Bottle. He’s especially tall for the film industry, in which actors are often much shorter than they appear onscreen—a holdover from when leading ladies and leading men had to be close in height, Elordi speculates. He is tall enough that petite costars sometimes need to stand on a box to be squarely in the shot, or he must split his legs into a V to mitigate the vertical differential.

Everybody has something to say about Elordi’s height. When his mother urged him to try modeling when he was 15, he was told he was too tall for the sample sizes. (“I’m very grateful,” he says of his aborted modeling career. “I truly think I would’ve been miserable if I had to do that.”)

He’s been told he’s too tall to be an actor, too. But how, he asks, does height affect someone’s empathy or emotional availability? “I guess tall people don’t experience things,” he jokes. One could make the argument that they don’t—that, per the memes, a tall man occupies such a privileged position, à la Jon Hamm in the hot-guy bubble on 30 Rock, that his empathy is limited. But one does not make this argument to Jacob Elordi at this time.

Besides, he explains, he’s not actually that tall. “The trick is they just always cast me with girls who are five-foot-two. Everyone’s like, ‘You’re so big!’ Yeah, but they’re also not big, not even average-sized women. They’re quite small.”

Head over to Men’s Health’s website to read the full article.