JACOB ELORDI IS YOUNG AND TALENTED AND STILL FIGURING IT ALL OUT
His star is on the rise, and he’s kind of glad. Kind of. Maybe.
“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.
The shyness is endearing, and a little unexpected from someone so Abercrombie looking. The attention on his body—which was full-on after The Kissing Booth, for which he trained twice a day, seven days a week—has unsettled him. The movie features a scene where a foam football bounces satisfyingly off his taut biceps like a grape off a firm mattress. “You learn quickly that what people take away from those movies is your stature and your figure,” he says. “You have all sorts of aged people around the world only talking about what you look like.”
