Jacob Elordi did not enter a drama school and graduate prepared and polished. Injury, moving, and the kind of unintentional self-discovery that usually occurs when a teen is stuck in the wrong city with nothing left to prove on a sports field shaped his educational path, which was more complicated than that.
Elordi was born in Brisbane in 1997 and lived there for the first twelve years of his life before his family relocated to Melbourne. It was for one of his sisters who had been admitted to the Australian Ballet School, not for him. It’s easy to ignore that kind of family-first turmoil in a biography, but it’s important. A twelve-year-old was taken from his hometown, relocated to a new city, and enrolled in Melbourne’s private, all-boys Catholic St. Kevin’s College. That is a specific type of adolescence.
Elordi first appeared on stage at St. Kevin’s, where she began participating in school musicals at the age of twelve. He starred in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Seussical. He was also a dedicated athlete at the time, playing basketball and rugby union for Victoria. In 2012, he was a member of the under-16 basketball team that won the national championship. This was a physically gifted young athlete who also enjoyed performing, so the picture of a quiet, artistic child discovering drama doesn’t quite fit. For a while, those two things coexisted.
The injury followed. Elordi suffered a severe back injury during a secondary school rugby match, which essentially put an end to his athletic aspirations. It’s the kind of moment that seems like a movie’s plot twist in retrospect, but it was probably just excruciating and annoying at the time. His focus shifted to acting. It’s difficult to tell if the injury made him do it or if it just allowed him to follow his instincts. Perhaps both.
Elordi enrolled at St. Joseph’s College in Nudgee, another all-boys Catholic school with strong ties to the Brisbane community, after the family moved back to Brisbane in 2013. In 2015, he received his degree from Nudgee. During these years, he read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in between drama class and the school library. According to him, it altered him in some way. Acting became “his church” after that, according to him. That’s noteworthy for a teenager to say, and it implies that the schools he went to, despite their shortcomings, provided him with enough intellectual room to engage with literature in that way.
During secondary school, Elordi also practiced an American accent, modeling it after none other than Vin Diesel. At the age of fifteen, his mother encouraged him to try modeling, but he was told he was too tall for the sample clothing. Apparently, he was already 6’5″. After graduating, she spent a year at a Melbourne acting school before moving to the US in 2017 at the age of 19.
Elordi’s educational background is intriguing because of what it wasn’t. There was no elite conservatoire, no early admission to NIDA or WAAPA, and no traditional training system that would have eliminated a particular type of Australian actor. His upbringing was more haphazard, involving Catholic education, athletics, a back injury, a Beckett play, and a strong personal fascination with actors such as Heath Ledger, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Marlon Brando. He studied their biographies and mimicked their actions. In a sense, he trained himself to become the actor he desired.
In one version of the story, those two schools in Melbourne and Brisbane hardly seem relevant. However, context often matters more than it first appears. The discipline of an all-boys Catholic school, the foundation in team sports, the unintentional exposure to the performing arts—all of these factors may have contributed to Elordi’s development as the kind of person who could devote himself entirely to characters as diverse as Nate Jacobs, Elvis Presley, and Frankenstein’s creature. Not because of any particular class or instructor, but rather because the entire experience forced him to look inward and discover something on his own.
