Imagine waking up to four million Instagram followers. For Jacob Elordi, it wasn’t a dream.
The Euphoria star experienced such swift fame after The Kissing Booth debuted at midnight on Netflix in 2018, where he went from an unknown to a breakout star quite literally overnight, according to a newly published GQ profile.
“I had to go through and delete my high school pictures because that was the Instagram that I used for my life,” the 25-year-old actor recalls to GQ. “I wish people could understand how drastic that change was.”
In the time before the project turned him into a breakout star, the Australian actor was sometimes sleeping in his car. “I wasn’t booking jobs,” he reveals. “I think I had — I don’t know, $400 or $800 left in my bank account, and Euphoria was my last audition before I went home for a little while to make some money and recuperate.”
As fans know, he struck gold again as Nate Jacobs on the megahit HBO series, but before either role took off, his means were limited and it took a producer noticing his living situation to put him up at a hotel. “My car was like a hoarder’s, stacked with boxes and coat hangers and things,” he recalls.
While massive fame did come, it didn’t make matters exactly better. Instead, the attention on him and his personal life spurred him to want to quit acting. It “might sound quite sensitive and dramatic, but I am sensitive and I’m very dramatic,” he tells GQ. “I hated being a character to the public. I felt so far from myself.”
His relationships, including with Kissing Booth co-star Joey King and Kaia Gerber, have only fanned the flames of public interest in Elordi, making him a target of the paparazzi. “It felt like, all of a sudden, I was a poster,” he says, recalling the first time he was photographed with someone else. “Like I was a billboard. It felt like it was for sale. Then my brain went through the f**king wringer. Like, I wasn’t sure if I was genuine. It really skews your view… It creates a very paranoid way of living.”
And if there’s anyone who understands being a media fixture, it’s Ben Affleck, Elordi’s Deep Water co-star. He sought some advice from the seasoned star, regarding false speculation that Elordi was calling the paparazzi on himself.
As the GQ writer put it, “The worst part, Affleck said, is that in certain bleak moments you start feeling like a phony. You start wondering whether maybe you really did want the paparazzi to catch that snapshot of you.”
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