To everyone except fans of the teen drama Euphoria, Jacob Elordi’s star seemed to explode from nowhere two years ago. In 2023, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn revealed to global audiences the breadth of the young Queenslander’s range – a tormented and controlling Elvis in one vehicle, a charmingly selfish young British aristocrat in the other. They also certified him as a bona fide celebrity and sex symbol – the kind that can inspire lookalike contests.
Australians might be forgiven for not knowing the 27-year-old actor is one of us: aside from a handful of small roles (including his feature film debut, aged 17 in Stephan Elliott’s Swinging Safari – “I think I said two words, probably ‘shag me’,” he says) – he’s mostly played Americans and Brits.
Elordi’s casting as Dorrigo Evans in the screen adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker prize-winning epic, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, out this month on Prime Video in Australia and later this year on the BBC in the UK, marks his first lead role playing an Australian.
Partly inspired by the legendary Edward “Weary” Dunlop and partly inspired by Flanagan’s own father, Dorrigo is an Australian Army medical officer turned Japanese prisoner of war on the Burma-Thailand railway, fighting to keep his comrades alive. He takes psychological refuge from the brutality of the jungle, back-breaking labour and his captors in memories of a unresolved love affair.
Like Flanagan’s novel, the five-part series takes place within three distinct timeframes: the prewar “summer of love” Dorrigo shares with his uncle’s much younger wife, Amy, played by Odessa Young (warning: graphic sex); the years as a PoW in the jungle (warning: graphic gore); and the 1980s, as an ageing, cynical and emotionally remote Dorrigo (played by Ciarán Hinds) takes stock of his life.
The preparation for the PoW scenes was gruelling, requiring more than just emaciated bodies. The reality of forced hard labour coupled with starvation meant Narrow Road’s PoW survivors had to be skin and sinew.
The cast undertook a medically supervised six-week boot camp in rainforest south of Sydney to achieve the effect. Elordi says the on-screen camaraderie mirrors the close relationships the actors formed while shedding weight over that time.
“We were all in it together, so there was this great overwhelming amount of love in the whole process,” says the actor.
“It was incredibly challenging but deeply necessary, of course … because nobody wanted to phone that in or make a mockery of it.”
Skin in the game
Narrow Road marks an important first for director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant – the collaborative duo have never worked on a television series before – but the sense of moral responsibility around retelling traumatic episodes of Australian history is familiar ground. Their 2011 film, Snowtown, told the true story of one of Australia’s most grisly series of murders, while their 2021 film, Nitram, examined the events leading up to Tasmania’s Port Arthur massacre.
Added to this was the gravitas of Flanagan’s book, the winner of seven major literary prizes including the Booker, and a work that earned the author the highest of praise, with the Economist dubbing Flanagan “the finest Australian novelist of his generation” and the New York Review of Books counting him “among the most versatile writers in the English language”.
Like Flanagan, whose father was a Japanese PoW during the second world war, both director and screenwriter felt they had skin in the game. Kurzel’s grandfather was one of the Rats of Tobruk, and Grant’s grandfather was a survivor of the Burma-Thailand railroad.
“In a lot of ways, [he] was who I was writing it for,” says Grant. “My grandfather was a very flawed man, and even though I loved him dearly, I may have looked at him and judged him in certain ways.
“When I first read Richard’s book, it felt like I really got to know my grandfather for the first time, to feel what he must have gone through … because he never talked about any of that himself.
“The only time I remember him talking about that time was when I mentioned to him I’d watched The Bridge Over the River Kwai. ‘We never whistled,’ was all he said.”
While Hinds’ older Dorrigo carries the trauma of survivor’s guilt, a disdain for sentimentality and an obsession with self-reliance, Elordi believes his young Dorrigo hints at many of the flaws that only reveal themselves later in the character’s life.
“A lot of who he is was there before the war – there’s this inherent stoic selfishness … and a lust for the immediacy,” Elordi says of Dorrigo, who embarks on an affair with Amy while engaged to his future wife, Ella (played as a young woman by Olivia DeJonge, and later by a wearily resigned Heather Mitchell).
“He’s like a man on an odyssey his whole life – a singular hero’s journey – and I think that is greatest flaw,” says Elordi. “But strangely, in some ways, I also struggle to call it a flaw … it’s what made him human, and what got him through the war.”
A cinematic odyssey
Fellow Tasmanians Kurzel and Flanagan have enjoyed a close friendship for many years, which added a further layer of weighty responsibility to the project, the director says.
Some characters in the series come across significantly more sympathetically than in the book: like Simon Baker’s Uncle Keith, whose capacity to attract a beautiful young wife and keep her pulling beers behind the sticky counter of his country pub is more believable on screen; and Major Nakamura (Shô Kasamatsu), who seems almost as trapped in the jungle as the Australians he is guarding. This is simply part of the organic process of transforming literature into film, Kurzel says.
“As soon as you put anyone on screen, you find the good and bad in them,” he says. “That’s what’s so special about cinema – you can see it on the actors’ faces, you can feel another dimension to them.”
There was no discussion with Flanagan about redressing one of the few criticisms levelled at the book: that its depiction of the Burma-Thailand railway construction largely ignored the fact that while about 2,800 Australian soldiers perished during its construction, almost 100,000 south-east Asian civilians also lost their lives under the same conditions.
Kurzel disputes the criticism.
“There are really beautiful moments and observations in the book from the [Australian] soldiers recognising that other slave labour was happening at the time. And Richard [also] included the point of view of the Japanese soldiers after the war, [and the impact] of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“But in terms of making a TV series, it is a piece of cinema. There is something so singular about Dorrigo. It is a story told from his point of view and that’s the way it played out – we wanted everything to be seen through the prism of Dorrigo.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North will premiere on Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada on 18 April
