Jacob Elordi hit the Berlin Festival on Saturday with Justin Kurzel‘s WWII drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in which he plays a medical officer in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the Thailand-Burma railway line.
Elordi and his fellow cast members addressed the challenge of losing significant amounts of weight for their roles.
The Saltburn and Priscilla star was surprisingly upbeat about the experience, suggesting camaraderie among the cast had helped him get through the ordeal.
“It was a very calming experience to do it with all the lads. I think there was something quite profound that happened in that it wasn’t a complete torture,” he said.
“There was a peace that sort of came over all of us when we were in the camps, and you reach a level of love that goes beyond what you’re used to in your everyday because everything gets stripped away, and you come down to the bare bones of, ‘Is my mate okay Am I okay? How can I help? Do you want a jelly bean?’,” he said.
“You’re watching each other and you’re taking care of each other. So it becomes quite primal, and I’m just really grateful to have shared that with these lads and the other boys… it was a really beautiful experience.”
Elordi plays Lieutenant-Colonel Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor whose all-too-brief love affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy Mulvaney (Odessa Young), shaped his life.
Told over multiple time periods, the five-part follows Dorrigo as a Far East prisoner of war during the construction of the Burma Railway. Decades later, he finds his growing celebrity at odds with his feelings of failure and guilt.
The show – the first two episodes of which are showing as a special gala screening stars – marks a return to Australia for Kurzel, after the U.S.-set neo-Nazi thriller The Order, and Elordi.
“It was a dream come true, and it was a filmmaking experience that I haven’t quite had in my life. And honestly, like long live Australian cinema, it is truly a beautiful thing, and I hope to spend a lot of my time there making pitches,” said Elordi.
Based on the 2014 Booker Prize winning novel of the same name by Richard Flanagan, the mini-series reunites Kurzel with long-time collaborator, writer Shaun Grant.
Both men said they had drawn to the novel for how it chimed with the World War Two prison camp experiences of their grandfathers.
“I grew up with these two very important men in my life that lived with the fog of war and in the midst of it, and I could feel the sort of shadow of that past, very deeply,” said Kurzel.
Grant revealed that one of his grandfathers had been even worked on the Thailand-Burma railway line, and spent many years as POW.
“I saw the effects that it had on him and I remember the first time I read Richard’s book, I walked away knowing my grandfather better than I did prior to that. He didn’t speak about it. I was fortunate that Richard’s father, who also served on the line, did, and otherwise we wouldn’t have the text,”said Grant.
“So that was the personal reason. But with any project, it’s just story, and it’s just a beautifully constructed story. I think there’s a reason why war stories are continuing to be told. They show the extremity of humanities in all its highs and lows, good and bad, love and loss.”