- I'm Jacob Elordi
and I'm in studio with The Hollywood Reporter.
(upbeat music)
- Now Zendaya has said
that when she first read this script
she signed on because of how fast she read the script.
Was that a similar experience for you?
- Yeah, totally.
I usually,
you read a lot of scripts
and you read like 20 pages of them
and you just want to throw them at the wall
and never look at them again
but this was like--
- Have you gotten a lot of those where you just toss 'em?
- Yeah.
Well I couldn't be so arrogant.
Before this show,
I kind of had to take whatever sort of came my way
'cause I was just starting out
but just even when I read this,
even though I was in that kind of position,
you just knew from the moment you read it,
it reads like the show plays.
It's so fast paced
and it's so in depth
and nothing in it was a cliche.
You just knew the moment that you read it
that it was like a really fine piece of work.
- For you, what were some of the wow moments
specifically that jumped out of the page?
- The kitchen scene for me
was the scene that I auditioned with and--
- [Brian] The knife?
- The knife scene, yeah.
And it's one of those scenes where
I saw it in my head when I was reading it
and it's kind of like an actor's dream,
well for me anyway,
to be able to like do something of that level.
I never had something come across in a script,
nor have I done anything in my work
that would demand that kind of intensity and stuff.
So that was for me,
it was like one of the biggest scenes
that stood out to me.
It's like imprinted from the first read.
- It's really intense.
I guess that's the best way to describe it.
- I think so, yeah.
- As is the whole series, it's intense.
- Yeah, your chest is kind of like.
- It's gut wrenching a bit, too.
- Totally, 100%.
Making it was as well.
The experience of making it,
I think is sort of on par with watching it.
- Going off that,
how did this series challenge you most as an actor?
It seems really draining in terms of emotional.
- Yeah, we, all of us kind of I guess went to hell and back
in the best way possible.
We shot for almost a year
and it was almost every day
and playing Nate every single day and being,
'cause I'm kind of the complete opposite to him as a person
as I hope most people are.
- Yeah I hope you are.
I'm kicking you out of here.
- But it was so demanding.
I don't think I've ever been so tired,
nor confused,
just because you'd go to work
and you'd work all day
and then you'd go home, sleep
and then you'd wake up back at the studio
and it felt like you were in this trance
the whole time.
But it was physically demanding,
it was mentally taxing
but it was so much fun.
- It was fun?
- You felt like you were exhausting like every bit of
everything that you had.
It kind of felt like you were putting it into the role,
well I felt like I was putting it into the role every day.
I hope it looks like that.
- It's euphoric, it's euphoria.
- Literally, yeah.
- And kind of getting into the psychology of Nate,
how did you first see him?
- It's funny,
in the first episode,
you get this kind of
somewhat stereotypical kind of,
it sets the field for who he is
and it's this,
you see this aggressive jock
who's got all this pent up anger
and is just incredibly arrogant and full of himself
but I kind of had a feeling from the get go
that like it wasn't gonna,
because nothing else in the show is that simple.
And so I started a journal
from basically when I got the role.
So I have this whole journal that's full of
it's kind of
like his perspective. - Oh really?
- Yeah and there's photos of the whole cast in it.
But it's like what he thinks of them and stuff like that.
So it was like,
it was this whole kind of,
it was a journey figuring out who he was
and it changed so much
as the show went on
'cause we would get scripts sort of weekly
with revisions and stuff like that.
And the character kind of changed
as I changed.
We kind of made it up as we went sort of thing
so it was really interesting.
- Did you sympathize with him at all
or did you find it really difficult to?
- 100,000%.
Not even in that way of like where people's,
actors always say
that you have to empathize with your character,
even if they're the bad guy or whatever.
But I just,
I never was able to see him as the bad guy,
whether it's 'cause I approached the story
from his perspective always.
But I would do a scene
where I'd be physically hurting someone
and then the crew, people would be like--
- Yeah that's right, he hurts a lot of people.
- Right yeah.
They'd be like oh you're such an asshole,
you're such a macho dick.
And it didn't really register for me
because I really couldn't see it
because the way that I tried to play every scene
was as if what he was doing was like,
it was like his truest intention,
like he wanted to save his family
or he wanted to save Maddy
and he wanted to love her.
He was just trying to fix problems
in the only way that he knew how,
like kind of with every fiber of his being.
And unfortunately,
that makes him,
in society, you can't behave or act like that.
But in terms of him as like a frightened boy,
he was kind of acting incredibly instinctually
and I can't find fault in him nor blame him.
- Get into his relationship with Maddy.
You see him go on his violent rage
when beating up the guy she slept with at the party.
And it was very American Psycho.
He takes a shower after.
- I'm so glad you said that.
- Did you see it that way?
How did you see it?
- We spoke about that.
Sam and I spoke about it
being somewhat reminiscent of that.
And that was sort of when the character changed a lot too
and I don't want to say sociopath
but like I noticed,
I sat back and I was like,
I realized that there was
an emptiness to him after that scene,
like a very,
like you know when Patrick Bateman puts on his--
- The little face.
- Yeah he does his thing in the morning.
I kind of sort of watched that scene
and I started thinking about that kind of thing.
'Cause he intellectualizes everything.
Nate kind of like thinks about everything
and then very rarely shows it
unless he's super angry.
So I kind of went into this kind of sociopath sort of state
and did that kind of thing.
- What was that face again?
- Just watch the show
because sometimes even I think
he doesn't really look like,
sometimes I don't think I look like,
I watch the show and I'm like, I don't know.
- 'Cause a lot of it is kind of an internal struggle,
like you want to know what's going through his head.
- Totally.
That's what happened.
He was quite loud at the start
and then as we kept going
there's so many moments
where he's just really quiet,
like I would just sit in a room
or be in a room just watching everyone,
which was really fun,
really, really interesting.
- What were the conversations like
about getting this story right
and kind of the sensitivity around the subject matter?
- I didn't give it a lot of thought
because I didn't want to approach it
from like a socially conscious point of view,
'cause then I might judge it.
So I kind of,
I think a lot of us,
we kind of came into it like
we're playing teenagers
that exist in this world
and are products of the world.
So to kind of have those outsider opinions
on like a social construct,
for me anyway, it would've thrown me.
So I kind of just believed everything as it was
and sort of behaved how he would behave.
Obviously, with the show coming out and everything,
there's so many social things
that people are gonna take from it
but I can't say that I,
I just sort of left the social politics in the side
and just wanted to act.
- In episode two,
it's the reveal that Nate was the one texting Jules.
What was your reaction to kind of figuring that out?
I saw the rest of the episodes
so I know kind of how it turns out
but what was your take on it?
- It took weeks of sort of book work
and Sam and I worked quite,
we were quite ambiguous with it the whole time.
Sometimes we didn't even know
why he was doing it,
whether it's to manipulate her
or whether it's because he actually has feelings for her
and I think that was the best place
to come at it from.
- Walk that line of both kind of.
- Yeah because I don't think he knows either
because there's a moment
where you see him with her
and you're not sure,
I wasn't even when I was doing it,
whether I was being truthful with her
or whether I was manipulating her.
I didn't know.
And we kind of toe that line a lot of the way through
and it kind of helps not having a clear stance
on what he thought about her.
- And that happens in episode four,
this airs before that,
without giving too much away,
but that episode was really well done
in terms of the affair
and kind of this chaos
and this tends to be the movement.
How was filming that?
- It was incredible.
The thing at the start
is essentially a one shot with a carnival.
So cool.
And shooting it was so cool.
We had these cameras on cranes
and they'd go through stitch points
and then carry the girls up the ferris wheel
and then drop back down to me
and it's all practical,
there's no green screens.
- It brings you in there.
You feel like you're there kind of in a sense.
- Yeah, we built a carnival in Pomona.
They built an entire carnival in the middle of nowhere.
So this fully functioning carnival
with tracks all through it
and the tracks would like,
the cameras would just pop out from behind a ride
and then swing behind us
and you'd have to get from this side of the carnival
to that side of the carnival
and then continue your dialogue.
It was mental.
And there was hundreds and hundreds,
I think 400 extras or something like that.
- It's like a psychological roller coaster,
I feel like that's the best way to--
- We were literally there.
- Were you guys able to enjoy any of the rides?
- We did.
When we got to work,
we got to go on the rides and stuff
but I'm quite awful at rides, I get sick.
- You get sick on rides?
- Yeah, it's terrible.
- Just like motion sickness or?
- I get sick like spinning in circles.
- I think most people do, I don't know.
Going off that though,
with the subject matter being so kind of dark,
what are some of your other favorite memories
from filming with the cast?
- We were like a tight knit family.
We spent so many hours on set.
I think my favorite,
so Hunter and I were really close
and we would just lay outside of the trailers and sun bake
and eat food and talk for hours
and then we'd go inside and give each other hell
and then we'd come back out and just,
we'd just like hold each other and lay.
It was home.
Being at Sony was like our home.
- Now Nate and Rue have kind of this backstory,
they touch up on it in episode one
but you don't really have that many scenes together.
Will we see more scenes with you and Zendaya?
- Yeah.
It boils to,
it's kind of this protagonist, antagonist kind of thing.
There's this slow burning tension, I suppose,
between the two of them,
her as Jules' protector
and then him as whatever he is to Jules.
I like the way that that triangle kind of works
'cause there's so much
going on. - It's an important
part of the show.
It's the whole show, yeah.
What were you like as a high school student?
I hope your life wasn't like this, right?
- I was exactly like Nate.
No.
I was like a theater kid.
I read a lot of plays and watched a lot of movies.
I played sport as well,
which is kind of a way that I understand
sort of like the masculinity of a football player
and stuff like that.
I kind of knew those circles of people
but it was nothing like that.
My dad's really normal.
He loves my mom. - Good, good, good.
We're good to go.
Would you want to see a second season with these characters?
You think there would be?
- I could live with these people
for the rest of my life.
- That's scary to know.
- No, it's demanding.
It would be nice to see an enormous change in him.
It's so exciting
'cause the way that the show ends,
the second season would just be out of this world.
Everything changes and gets flipped on its head and
I would love to, yeah, personally.
- Obviously fans are excited
for the kiss scene with (mumbles).
Briefly, what can they expect?
- Nothing is the same.
There's a bunch of new people that come into the fray
and drama ensues.
- That's a great tease.
Drake is attached to Euphoria as executive producer.
Did you get to meet him?
Were you a big Drake fan? - I did.
I did.
And I am a Drake fan.
I did, I met him on set once
and he was so lovely.
He was so kind
and then he left with a fleet of armored cars out of Sony.
It was a weird sensation.
I'd just done a huge scene
and then I walked out and Drake was there
and I was exhausted.
I was like it's Drake, oh hey Drake, what's up, Drake?
And then he left as if he was never there.
- Did he have a note about the show, about Nate,
or did he say anything?
'Cause he came from a high school
show. - He didn't know
I was Australian, that's what I remember
and then I spoke to him and he was like,
what, you're Australian?
Which I felt pretty cool about.
- [Brian] That means your accent was good?
- I hope so.
- Heath Ledger is obviously your idol.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Is he someone who made you want to
kind of break into acting?
What are some of your favorite roles of his?
- When I decided that I wanted to be an actor
was when I watched The Dark Knight.
But I had this moment like a year ago
where I realized
all of these films,
we used to go to the Blockbuster on Fridays,
we'd get movies out
and I just, it just clicked for me like a year ago
that every Friday,
I would either get out Brothers Grimm or A Knight's Tale.
So he's kind of been without me knowing
in my sort of space for the longest time.
But I think my favorite role of his is in Candy
and that's the kind of work
that makes me want to be an actor,
like to do something like that would just be.
And his ethos as well,
just the way that he looked at Hollywood
and the way that he kind of looked at the world.
It's like, at first I thought I was a fan
and then now the more I sort of read about him
and see about him, I'm like,
it's like parallels and I feel very similar to him
a lot of the time.
- What are you looking forward to most
about Joaquin Phoenix's kind of take on the joker?
- That's gonna be cool.
I love Joaquin.
I think he's one of those people
that's in my top five people that like,
he's like a dangerous actor and you never,
I don't even care that it's the joker,
I don't care that it's a superhero film
or that they've made a bunch of them.
I think any time that he's on screen,
I will give my undivided attention.
I would sit down for a week and not leave my television
if he was just doing stuff on it.
- Just watching him do improv basically.
- Yeah 'cause he just does things that like--
- Watch him get motion sickness on a roller coaster?
- Right, but his delivery and stuff is just like,
it's inhuman,
I don't even know how he comes up with the way that he,
I don't even know.
- You have a few other projects coming up,
Two Hearts and The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee.
- Yeah.
- What are you looking forward to most
about having these projects be released to the world?
- Two Hearts has an incredible message
and it's a true story.
So I'm excited for people to kind of be aware
of the subject matter
and of Chris Gregory,
the boy whose life it's about.
And The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee
is incredibly exciting for me.
I got like a phone call
and it was actually,
it was because of Two Hearts,
because the director of Two Hearts
is friends with Paul Hogan
and he had said, you should put this kid in your movie
and then Paul was like okay.
And I mean that's Dundee,
he's an Australian icon and he's a living legend
and on top of that he's a really good bloke.
So that's just hilarious
and I can't wait to see myself on screen with Dundee
with Paul Hogan.
It's crazy for me.
As an Aussie, it's like what?
- That's a dream role.
You made it.
- Yeah, I'm really excited.
I'm really excited. - Are you gonna come back
and talk about all things coming up?
- Yep.
- Thanks so much for being here.
- Thank you very much.
- Don't miss Euphoria,
Sunday nights on HBO.
- Thank you.