Like Jeremy Allen White and Paul Mescal before him, Jacob Elordi’s star is on the rise such that he not only has to answer the obligatory superhero question in interviews now, but he’s also confident enough in his place in the industry to risk poking the Marvel bear.
When asked for a new GQ profile whether or not he could ever see himself in a superhero movie, Elordi got straight to the point: “Not particularly, no.” “I’ve always been told to say a rounded answer or my agent will get mad at me. ‘Anything can happen!’” he continued. “And obviously anything can happen, but at this stage in my life, I don’t see myself having any interest in that. I like to make what I would watch, and I get very restless watching those movies.”
For Elordi, this isn’t mere speculation. “[T]hey asked me to read for Superman,” he revealed, presumably referring to James Gunn’s upcoming Superman: Legacy, now starring David Corenswet. “That was immediately, ‘No, thank you.’ That’s too much. That’s too dark for me.”
On the flip side is sugary sweet The Kissing Both (and its sequels), which gave Elordi his start back in 2018. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of love lost there. “I didn’t want to make those movies before I made those movies,” he said. “Those movies are ridiculous. They’re not universal. They’re an escape.” “You have no original ideas and you’re dead inside. So it’s a fine dance,” he elaborated, when asked about Hollywood’s “one for them, one for me,” ethos, by which stars occasionally step into a tentpole in exchange for appearing in a smaller, more exciting film. “My ‘one for them,’ I’ve done it.”
It’s through dark independent films (that are apparently not quite as dark as Superman) that Elordi has found his niche. After receiving glowing reviews for his turn in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the Euphoria star will next appear as an extravagant, pierced-eyebrow-sporting aristocrat in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn and later as a younger version of a character played by Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
It sounds like Elordi is very happy with where he’s landed, or in his words, the fact that he finally feels like he’s “in the movie now” (original emphasis). “How is caring about your output pretentious?” he asked in relation to the superhero question. “But not caring, and knowingly feeding people shit, knowing that you’re making money off of people’s time, which is literally the most valuable thing that they have—how is that the cool thing?”