Jacob Elordi on filming Narrow Road to the Deep North: "We physically changed so much"

Adapted from the Man Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel by Richard Flanagan, the decades-spanning story sees Elordi play Dorrigo Evans, a medical student who falls in love with his uncle’s wife Amy (Odessa Young) before World War II.

Unpacking his life in three distinct timelines, with an ageing Dorrigo played by Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, the crunch comes in 1943 when he’s held a prisoner-of-war and forced to work on the notorious Thai-Burma railway.

Elordi spent 12 months researching the character, to “let everything marinate” before shooting began, he tells RadioTimes.com. “Maybe because it’s such a well-documented time in history, I suppose there’s so much reading and cinema that pertains to that world and that time.

“So it was just a year of immersing myself in history and literature and then getting to shoot the thing and having to put all my books away and actually shut up and act!”

Directing The Narrow Road is Elordi’s fellow Australian Justin Kurzel. The filmmaker is good friends with Flanagan and was personally asked by the author to adapt the book.

“Richard is regarded as one of our greatest writers,” he says. “And what he’s writing about… the story of the Burma railway, and how many Australians died on the railways, [it’s] something that’s really significant. So there’s a legacy there that’s important.”

Already, the series has drawn comparisons to Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, the 1983 BAFTA-winning movie starring David Bowie as a soldier in a Japanese POW camp.

“Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence captures the intimacy of the soldiers when they’re all laid together sick and they’re singing and the humour between the men in this horrible time,” says Elordi. “I think that film does a really great job of capturing that in the same way that I hope we do as well, the kind of tenderness between men in these situations.”

The series, however, is not simply a World War II survival drama. “It’s told through a lens of a love story,” Kurzel adds. “It’s told through this young man who has this extraordinary love affair that completely changes him and rocks him in a way.”

As the director puts it, “the residue of that love affair” is felt in the prisoner-of-war scenes, next to the “violence and the trauma and the unfathomable experiences” he is facing. “So I found the intimacy of that and the beauty of that very unusual. It felt quite present to today.”

While he’s all too familiar with the trials of making TV, thanks to Euphoria, Elordi compares The Narrow Road more to making a “five-hour movie”, due to Kurzel’s cinematic sensibilities.

“If anything, the performance aspect of making this show was more like theatre,” he adds, “because from the moment we would leave our trailers and we’d march to set together, we’d walk as a unit. The set was alive. There was no setting up or waiting for lights. You were there and you were in character and you were playing it for real. So it’s closer to theatre than any other experience I’ve had on a film set.”

Filmed in New South Wales, doubling for the Southeast Asian jungles, it was a gruelling shoot, physically. Elordi lost approximately 20lbs across six weeks, and coming out the other side of filming wasn’t easy. “The main thing was, we had physically changed so much. So there was just getting used to food and things like that again, but mentally, it wasn’t a great suffering or anything.”

Did he take anything away from playing Dorrigo? “I don’t have any traumatic lesson learned from Dorrigo Evans. I probably learned to be a bit quieter from him. Maybe.”

It also marks Elordi’s first major Australian project. “I had not really worked in Australia before. I’d only done a few things when I was younger that were quite silly. So this was my first time working with an Australian crew and working at home.”

Certainly, his team-up with Kurzel is one of the most exciting to come out of the southern hemisphere this year. Kurzel, who has already directed Michael Fassbender (on Macbeth and Assassin’s Creed), Jude Law (The Order) and Caleb Landry Jones (Nitram), admits he was excited about working with this rising star.

“I think it was a combination of his body of work that I started seeing,” says Kurzel. “I was super impressed by him, and there was just something also very immersive and at the same time cinematic about his feel on screen. But there was a quality about him that really spoke to Dorrigo.

“There was a dignity and grace and poise to Dorrigo. I knew we’d need to do a lot of filming, of seeing this man observe and watch and take in and get these little, nuanced moments of what he was feeling amongst this really powerful exterior.”

The 28-year-old Elordi’s rise isn’t likely to plateau anytime soon. He’s just wrapped a new version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell, playing Heathcliff to Margot Robbie’s Catherine. He’s also set to appear in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, as the Monster, further proof that he loves working with auteur directors.

“Movies are the most important thing in the world to me,” he says. “I never want to be a part of this endless stream of dull entertainment that’s there to make money. I want to be a part of these artists’ visions. I want to be a part of art.”

The Narrow Road to the Deep North begins on BBC One and iPlayer at 9.15pm on Sunday 20th July.

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