If you thought that 2023 was The Year of JACOB ELODI….. then just wait and see what he’s got in store for us in 2025

 

Jacob Elodi is one good reason that even at our ‘grown-up age’ we should not be too quick to dismiss Teen Angst TV Dramas.  We missed out on seeing him in The Kissing Booth film series (2018–2021) and also for his role as troubled high school football player Nate Jacobs in HBO‘s Euphoria (2019–present).  So it was quite a shock in 2023 to suddenly discover this 29-year-old 6’5″ Australian hunk starring in some of the best films of the year.

First, filmmaker Sofia Coppola said she cast Elordi to play Elvis in the Priscilla Presley biopic Priscilla, which is based on Priscilla’s memoir,  partially because of his “effect on women” during their first meeting, which she found comparable to Elvis’s. Then came Saltburn, a black comedy thriller by Emerald Fennell and it focuses on a student at Oxford  University  (Barry Keoghan) who becomes fixated with a popular, aristocratic fellow student (Elodi) who later invites him to spend the summer at his eccentric family’s estate. I think we all left the movie theatre feeling totally fixated too.  For his performance, he earned a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.  Then in his first film in 2024, Oh Canada he starred as a young Richard Gere.

Now his latest movie ON SWIFT HORSES a period drama about repressed sexuality is about to be released by Sony Pictures.  In this Elodi plays Julius the younger brother of Lee who is just returning home from the Korean War.  Lee is expecting Julius to live with him and his wife in San Deigo, but he prefers to go to Las Vegas and work in a casino.  There he meets Henry, a male co-worker and they fall in love and  begin a secret romantic relationship, including living together in a motel room.

When the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Fest it got some great reviews including this one from Jourdain Searles of The Hollywood Reporter  who wrote that the film is “beautiful, heartbreaking, and demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Elordi gives his best performance yet as Julius, showing his more sensitive, vulnerable side on the big screen for perhaps the first time. His love scenes with Calva are tender and exciting...

On Swift Horses will have a special  screening in Atlanta as part of the Out On Film Queer Mini Fest on March 19 and then on General Release from Sony Pictures Classic on April 25th