Jacob Elordi is back as Nate Jacobs in Euphoria Season 3, which premiered April 12 on HBO, returning to the role that first gave him a mainstream profile at the same moment his film career has arrived at a different level entirely. The 29-year-old Australian actor received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor earlier this year, recognized for his work in The Inheritance (2025), the psychological period drama that premiered at Venice and ran through awards season as one of the year's more discussed performances. He did not win. The nomination, in itself, reshaped how the industry thinks about him.
What has made Elordi's trajectory unusual is how little of it has been shaped by the conventional mechanics of celebrity management. He has no active social media presence. He gives limited press. He does not do the circuit of appearances and endorsements that contemporary actors typically deploy to maintain public visibility between projects. What he has instead is a body of work that has been building steadily, from the Kissing Booth trilogy to Euphoria to Saltburn to The Inheritance, in a direction that is increasingly hard to categorize by type.
Nate Jacobs in Euphoria Season 3
Nate Jacobs is one of the most analyzed characters in the original series. Across Seasons 1 and 2, he functioned as the show's primary antagonist: a high school athlete with serious emotional damage, a violent controlling streak, and a complicated relationship with his own desires. Sam Levinson wrote him as genuinely threatening rather than cartoonishly villainous, and Elordi played him with a specific kind of restrained volatility that made the character difficult to look away from even as the show made clear he was causing real harm.
Season 3's five-year time jump means Nate is now in his mid-twenties, married to Cassie Howard, and navigating whatever version of adulthood the show has constructed for characters who were defined by adolescent extremity. The creative question Levinson is working with is what a character like Nate looks like when the social framework of high school is gone and the behaviors it enabled have to exist in a different context. Promotional material has been deliberately limited about how that question is answered.
Elordi has said in limited pre-season press that Season 3 gives Nate "room to become something else without erasing what he was." That framing suggests Levinson is not simply redeeming the character or continuing the original arc unchanged, but attempting something more complicated. What that looks like across the season's episodes is what viewers arriving after April 12 will find out.
The Oscar Nomination and The Inheritance
The Inheritance, directed by French filmmaker Léa Mysius and produced by A24, put Elordi in a period setting for the first time in his career. He played Edward Mallory, a dissolving aristocrat in 1930s England navigating family collapse and moral disintegration in a film whose thematic weight sat at the intersection of class anxiety and personal ruin. The performance required him to be physically constrained in ways that his previous work had not and to carry the film's emotional register almost entirely through internal work rather than the external volatility he used in Euphoria and the more deliberately transgressive mode of Saltburn.
Critics singled out the performance as a departure rather than a continuation. The nomination placed him in a Best Actor race with several more established contenders, and while he did not win, the fact that he was there as a 29-year-old with a career that had genuinely surprised people with its seriousness was the more significant data point. A24's production relationship with him appears likely to continue based on development conversations that have been reported without specifics.
Saltburn (2023), directed by Emerald Fennell, was the film that first demonstrated what Elordi was capable of outside the safety of a franchise or a television role with an established audience. His performance as Felix Catton, the object of Oliver Quick's obsession, required a specific quality of effortless entitlement that the film needed to function. He delivered it in a way that made the film's final act land as genuine shock rather than simply twist for its own sake. That performance generated the kind of sustained critical conversation about an actor's capabilities that leads, eventually, to award nominations.
Physical Presence and What the Industry Does With It
Elordi is 6 feet 5 inches tall, a physical fact that has shaped how roles are conceived for him and that comes up in almost every profile written about his career. The observation is both literal and something more complicated: Hollywood has historically had a specific use for very tall, conventionally attractive actors, and that use does not always make room for the kind of internal, psychologically precise work that Saltburn and The Inheritance demonstrated he is capable of.
The Bond speculation is the most visible version of this pattern. Multiple entertainment outlets have included Elordi on lists of actors considered for the role following Daniel Craig's departure from the franchise. He has not confirmed any conversations with Eon Productions, the franchise's producers, and the studio has not made any announcement about the next Bond actor. What the speculation reflects is the industry's tendency to categorize actors whose physical presence matches a template, even when their actual work has consistently moved away from the genres that template implies.
| Film / Show | Year | Role | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Euphoria | 2019 onward | Nate Jacobs | Mainstream breakthrough; 3 seasons |
| Saltburn | 2023 | Felix Catton | Critical turning point; A24 |
| The Inheritance | 2025 | Edward Mallory | First Oscar nomination; Best Actor |
| Frankenstein | In production | The Creature | A24; most ambitious project to date |
Frankenstein and What Comes Next
Elordi is currently in production on Frankenstein, an A24 adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel in which he plays the Creature. The casting is, in retrospect, completely logical for someone who has spent three years building a filmography that consistently asks audiences to hold contradictory responses to the same character: sympathy and revulsion, attraction and threat. Shelley's Creature contains all of those elements and has historically been either reduced to monster iconography or elevated into genuine tragedy depending on the filmmaker. The A24 production appears to be attempting the latter.
The film has not released casting details for Victor Frankenstein or a confirmed release window. What has been reported is that the production is in active filming, that it is being made under the creative framework A24 has established for its prestige horror properties, and that it represents, by Elordi's own description in the limited press he has given, "the most demanding thing I've done."
The combination of that project's scope and the Oscar nomination's arrival at the same career moment suggests that Elordi is, intentionally or not, at the specific inflection point where the industry decides what category of actor he is. The evidence of the past three years is that he is one of the more interesting actors working at his age. Whether the roles available to him will consistently match that capacity is the question that the next two years of his filmography will answer.
The Private Star in a Public Industry
Elordi's decision to operate without social media and with minimal public presence is notable primarily because it is increasingly rare for actors at his level of visibility. Most contemporary actors maintain active platforms as part of their professional infrastructure, using them to communicate directly with audiences, shape their own narrative, and participate in the promotional ecosystem that studios expect. Elordi has declined that framework entirely.
The practical effect is that his public image is almost entirely constructed from professional work and the limited interviews he gives, rather than the curated personal content that social media generates. He has spoken publicly about his relationship with Olivia Jade Giannulli and discussed the difficulty of maintaining privacy as a public figure, but those conversations have been contained rather than continuous. His absence from the platforms that contemporary fame runs through makes him legible primarily through the work, which is, depending on your view, either a principled position or a long-term strategic bet that the work is strong enough to carry the profile without supplementation.
The career evidence through April 2026 is that it has worked. For Euphoria Season 3's full cast and premiere details, our premiere guide covers the complete season setup. For Sydney Sweeney's arc as Cassie Howard and her broader career trajectory, our profile has the full context.
