It didn’t take much for Jacob Elordi to sign on for Shaun Grant and Justin Kurzel‘s adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
In fact, one email from Kurzel was enough to seal the deal, the Euphoria star told Deadline.
“I’ve wanted to work with him for as long as I can remember,” he said. “Since I was an early teen, after seeing his film Snowtown. So for me, just getting his name in my inbox was all it really took.”
The five-part limited series, which launched Friday in the U.S. just days after Prime Video announced it had secured the U.S. distribution rights, follows Lieutenant-Colonel Dorrigo Evans throughout multiple pivotal moments in his life, from his all-too-brief love affair with his uncle’s wife Amy (Odessa Young) to his time as a prisoner of war on the Thailand-Burma Railway. Audiences also see Dorrigo later in life as a traumatized yet well respected surgeon and war hero.
Elordi plays the younger version of Dorrigo through both his love affair and his imprisonment — the later of which was particularly important for the actor to accurately portray given the personal connections to the story.
Watch on Deadline
“Richard’s father was a prisoner on the Death Railway, and so was the screenwriter Shaun Grant’s grandfather,” Elordi said. “There’s a generation of people who are directly affected by these events. So I think we just wanted to make sure that we told them as truthfully as possible, and as earnestly and with as much sincerity as we possibly could.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is also the first time that Elordi will be playing an Australian on-screen, which the Brisbane-born actor says has been a goal of his and only added to the weight of the project.
Dorrigo is a man of few words — as many men of that generation are — who, for better or worse, processes most of his emotions in silence. Elordi says it was a challenge to come to understand “the restraint and how much this generation of men kept on the inside.”
“So much of the work has to happen just in silence, which we’re familiar with because of our fathers and grandfathers, but to directly relive that experience, it takes a little bit of time and consideration, I suppose, because it’s so different to how we live now,” he added.
Adding to their dedication to authenticity, Elordi and the other actors tasked with portraying prisoners of war attended a grueling six-week boot camp to prepare for the roles, which he spoke highly of despite the intensity of the conditions, calling it “incredibly beautiful.”
“Justin had said to us before we started the process, ‘We need to go all the way on this, and I promise you when you come out of it, it’ll be something that you remember and cherish for the rest of your life.’ We took that to heart when we started,” he continued. “We always felt like we were working towards this common goal that we all agreed upon.”
Throughout his time as a prisoner of war, Dorrigo sustains himself on his memories of his affair with Amy, whom he meets while on leave from the military shortly before he is captured by Japanese soldiers. Their love story is very quick, but the passion lives on in Dorrigo for years to come.
“I don’t know if it can really be articulated,” Elordi mused of their connection, though he pointed to author Richard Flanagan’s own analysis of the characters for guidance.
“He spoke of [the idea that] there’s two moments in your life, like two asteroids hitting the Earth or something like that, and then the rest of your life is the ripple effects from that impact. And he said that for Dorrigo, the love of Amy was one of them. The other was the death camps,” he explained.
He says Kurzel called Dorrigo’s affections for Amy a “ghost love” that may or may not have lasted had the circumstances been different.
“If he didn’t go to war and he stayed with Amy and he followed his passion and his love, there’s a high chance that once the summer was over, they would have hated each other. They would have imploded,” he said. “But because she’s not in the camps, she can become this kind of otherworldly figure, and he can build her up for the years that he’s there, and she becomes this kind of divine thing to him. So it’s almost about the the power of like a ghost love, or the idea of love that sustains us.”
All five episodes of The Narrow Road to the Deep North are streaming on Prime Video.