Jacob Elordi Education: The Brisbane Schoolboy Who Barely Graduated and Then Won an Oscar Nomination

In one version of Jacob Elordi’s life, none of this occurs. Where his back injury sustained on a rugby pitch in Brisbane heals perfectly, where he continues to participate in sports throughout his adolescence, and where the drama class remains a necessary school requirement rather than a door that opens. Obviously, that version of Jacob Elordi doesn’t exist, but considering it makes the story seem more intriguing, sharper, and contingent.

Born in June 1997 in Brisbane, Jacob Elordi lived there for his first twelve years before moving to Melbourne with his family in 2010 so that his sister could attend the Australian Ballet School. At sixteen, he went back to Brisbane to complete his secondary education at St. Joseph’s Nudgee College, a private, all-boys Roman Catholic school in Boondall where religious discipline and rugby coexist peacefully. He said he felt “deeply unsettled” there, which is a subdued way of saying it wasn’t appropriate. He was a talented young athlete who played basketball and rugby union for Victoria. He was large, physically intimidating, and the son of a Basque house painter. Everyone in his immediate vicinity spoke the language of the sport. He said it with ease. However, he was not particularly interested in the language.

Depending on how you count them, his encounter with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a drama class at the age of fifteen was the pivotal moment. Something cracked open, or rather, something clicked. Acting became his “church” after that, according to him, and the description sounds real rather than dramatic. The concept of a practice that could absorb and give shape to all that restless inner energy must have been truly revelatory for an adolescent navigating an all-boys Catholic school where he felt like an outsider. He began taking acting classes, participated in school musicals like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Seussical, and studied the biographies of actors like Heath Ledger, Laurence Olivier, and Marlon Brando with the kind of fervor typically associated with athletes watching game footage.

Ledger in particular appeared to be important. Elordi has specifically cited Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight as the role that initially helped him comprehend what the most dedicated acting could entail. Growing up in Australia and being aware that Ledger was also Australian may have made the goal seem less impersonal. This was a local guy who, by sheer skill, had achieved extraordinary success. Elordi was practicing an American accent in his bedroom by the time he was fourteen, modeling it after Vin Diesel of all people. This is a very specific detail that suggests a child using whatever resources he had.

When he was sixteen, he suffered a rugby injury that ended his athletic career with a finality he has ironically referred to as a gift. He broke his back during a match. It gave him a strong push to act just when he needed it. By his own admission, he barely graduated from St. Joseph’s Nudgee College in 2015.

He then relocated to Melbourne to spend a year at an acting school. This is where the story really shines. There was a rule at the school that said you couldn’t audition for outside jobs while you were enrolled. Presumably, the idea was to keep students concentrated on laying their groundwork before looking for commercial employment. Elordi paid no attention to this at all. He was shooting self-tapes after hours and renting the school’s theater spaces late at night because he didn’t want to waste the time or the chance.
The school asked him to leave after they found out what he was doing. He reserved The Kissing Booth for the following Friday.

That series of events—being kicked out for disobeying the rules and being rewarded right away by the industry—sounds like a motivational story, but it seems to be exactly what happened. He relocated to Los Angeles, The Kissing Booth became one of Netflix’s most popular shows in 2018, and all of a sudden he was a teenage sensation with widespread fame and little else. In subsequent interviews, he described those movies as ones he made to get his foot in the door, to survive, and to do whatever it took to stay in the country long enough to find something better. He has been open about how little he wanted to make those movies.

What followed was genuinely dangerous. He was sleeping in his car on Mulholland Drive on occasion, his visa was expiring, his finances were tight, and he was helping friends record self-tapes for auditions he wasn’t getting. He assisted a group of friends in trying out for a part in Sam Levinson’s upcoming HBO series Euphoria, and at the last minute, he impulsively sent in his own tape. His manager had already been informed that he was considering returning home. He did a terrible job during the audition; he blushed, stumbled over his lines, and became anxious in a way that would have likely ended things for anyone else. They gave him a call back. He was cast as Nate Jacobs. He was desperate enough to cold-submit at his final audition.

It’s difficult to ignore how much of Jacob Elordi’s development took place outside of any official setting, such as in the back of cars, late-night theaters he wasn’t supposed to be using, the accumulation of actor biographies, and the unique experience of portraying a character so unlike himself that it made his true identity clear. After a year of craft training, the Melbourne acting school dismissed him. He received a diploma from the Australian educational system that he hardly earned. All Hollywood offered him was the chance to fail repeatedly until he succeeded.

What he added to that flimsy base—Saltburn, Priscilla, Frankenstein, and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor—indicates that the education that truly counts took place somewhere between the front seat of a car on Mulholland Drive and the rugby field in Brisbane, during the years when nothing was working but he continued to stay.