Jacob Elordi, a twenty-two-year-old Australian actor, first came onto my radar when I saw one of the most awful, yet entertaining movies to come out in the last few years: The Kissing Booth. In this movie, Elordi plays the bad-boy-older-brother-love-interest-heartthrob that the main character simply HAS to be with. Needless to say, there wasn't any performance in the whole movie that stood out to me as even trying to be decent, which to be fair, most likely has more to do with the material that the actors had to work with rather than the talent of the actors themselves.
In fact, as I later learned, Jacob Elordi is INSANELY talented.
This realization had not come to me until watching season one of Euphoria, the 2019 HBO teen drama starring Zendaya. In Euphoria, Elordi portrays yet another not so nice guy, but this one is bursting with depth. Nate Jacobs, Elordi's character, is one of the most interesting, layered characters I have ever seen placed on any screen. He is angry and temperamental and manipulative, but he is also a victim of a forced identity caused by toxic masculinity. Elordi's performance is heartbreaking and raw and real. Nate is set up as a sort of "villain" who knows no bounds, but in the last episode of the season, I was in tears over how broken this person was. All of his pain was catching up to him, you could see every centimeter of it all over Elordi's face. He absolutely KILLED this role.
So after forgetting all about his involvement in The Kissing Booth and choosing to only focus on what I knew of him from Euphoria, imagine how terribly my stomach began to flip when I saw the announcement for The Kissing Booth 2 that hits Netflix on July 24th, 2020. Now, I will watch it. I am a sucker for laughably bad movies. And hey, I have yet to see it, so who is to say it's bad?
That being said, it is clear to me that this type of work is way below Elordi's ability to capture a complex character and make it viscerally believable to the viewer. It is my hope that after this highly anticipated sequel drops, we can collectively forget about it and continue to pray that season two of Euphoria drops sooner.
On a serious note, Jacob Elordi is young, talented, and making a name for himself. I, for one, am super excited to see where his career goes and the work that he does, hoping that The Kissing Booth(s) are mere promoters rather than the type of work that his career consists of.
