Can I Just Say, Jacob Elordi

How was my weekend? It was great! I left my apartment, saw many friends, did a lot of exciting things, and had multiple interesting and humorous conversations with other humans. It’s weird that you ask, almost like you’re suggesting I didn’t leave the house once and instead just watched the new Wuthering Heights trailer on a loop. But I actually didn’t even know there was a new Wuthering Heights trailer until you just mentioned it. Oh, you didn’t? Hmm, well, but we’re already here, so we may as well just watch it.

As of Monday morning, the trailer, which came out Thursday, has well over 21 million views, so I’m not going to write something patronizing like, “If you haven’t seen the new Wuthering Heights trailer…,” because you absolutely fucking have. Even if you won’t admit it. So instead, I will just say… Jacob Elordi?!?!?

Yes, I’m brand new to…whatever his fandom his called. The Jacobis? The Elordians? Team Jacob? And I’m sorry it took me this long, but I’m ready to pay my dues and collect my t-shirt. Since Euphoria premiered in 2019, I’ve respected his rise, even if I did not really care. I enjoyed the show enough, and Saltburn was fine, but I had no interest in Priscilla, and still don’t know what The Kissing Booth is. Despite his height (an objectively hot 6’5″), I simply did not get the obsession. I have never been more wrong about anything in my entire life.

In September, the Wuthering Heights teaser dropped, and while many English majors lost their collective mind over Emerald Fennell’s sex-dungeon, fever-dream interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel, I nearly choked on my tongue upon seeing him bearded on the English moors, murmuring, “I can follow you like a dog to the end of the world.”

Days before the official trailer, I watched Elordi in Frankenstein and was blown away by his performance. The range, the roaring, the height (!!!), the escape, the friendship, the moment where he gifts Mia Goth a leaf?! I wept, I startled, I swooned. Most of all, I could not believe I was fully fangirling over Jacob “Oh, I’m also from Australia” Elordi. I know actors hate to be typecast, but Elordi seems to have found his niche (and likely Oscar bait) in the tall, dark, and mysterious characters of the 19th-century Western canon. I want to see him in Dracula next, or as Rochester in Jane Eyre, and while I’m hesitant to argue that Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy left anything to be desired—fuck it, let’s make Elordi Mr. Darcy. Also, we desperately need a new remake of Sleepy Hollow…

At the center of my newfound Elordi obsession is the question of what makes a male movie star a star? This has eluded me my entire life. Leonardo DiCaprio and Denzel Washington are fine enough, but I deeply dislike Tom Cruise, and don’t get George Clooney or Robert Downey Jr., and I really don’t get Glen Powell. Before September, if you asked me my favorite male movie star, I would have made a snarky comment about being annoyed by all men before reluctantly answering Idris Elba (so hot, very talented) and Ryan Gosling (so hot and funny!)—still, I have never watched any of their movie trailers, let alone their movies, more than 10 times. Elordi’s very hot, but he’s yet to prove he’s funny, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t care less if a man can make me laugh. I guess maybe that’s the real star quality here: his inexplicable charisma. That one-second shot of his side-eye-cry in the trailer was enough to turn me into the Elordi version of Club Chalamet.

And yes, there is plenty to criticize about the Wuthering Heights trailer and (I suspect) the upcoming film. Like, are we really calling this a “love” story—and could this really be based on one of the greatest English novels of all time?? Fennell herself admitted that this “primal, sexual” interpretation isn’t necessarily faithful to the source material. And while I was skeptical of that creative choice at first, now that I’ve seen Elordi’s shoulder-length hair, I could not be more grateful to Fennell for just going with her gut here. (Though it must be said that Brontë’s Heathcliff certainly wasn’t white.) But there will be a time and a place for all those think pieces, but that is not here and not now.

Right now, I’d like to congratulate Elordi’s agent, his publicist, and his entire team—one gothic trailer in (I haven’t even seen the whole movie yet!) and I’m in full-on freak mode for this man who, again, despite his height and rising star, I had barely registered. I hope you all got raises this year. And I hope Hollywood is giving Jacob Elordi a beard and sticking him in every monster story or period piece produced in the coming decade. If there aren’t enough scripts, call me, and I’ll write the next one. I’ll have plenty of time once YouTube blocks me from watching the trailer again.