Narrow Road to the Deep North: Jacob Elordi doesn’t always love his work but he really loves this

When writer and novelist Richard Flanagan met actor Jacob Elordi, he gave the younger man something of deep personal significance.

“He gave me a nail from the original railway from his old man,” Elordi told The Nightly. “We had it and we passed it around the boys and it was always there with us on set. It has an incredible weight to it.”

The original railway here is the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway, 415kms of track built by captured Allied troops and Asian forced labourers during World War II. Of the 13,000 Australian prisoners of war that the Imperial Japanese army condemned to work on the project, almost 3000 died from malnutrition, disease and brutal treatment.

Flanagan’s father was a POW on the railway and his experiences were part of the inspiration for the writer’s book, Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Booker Prize in 2014. It has now been adapted into a five-part miniseries starring Elordi, Thomas Weatherall, Ciaran Hinds and Odessa Young, and directed by Justin Kurzel from scripts by Shaun Grant.

“Richard was so warm and open to me,” Elordi expanded. “I went to Tassie with Tom Weatherall, and I got to spend time with Richard in some of the places that are in the book.

“I’m sure initially, there was a fear and trepidation, you don’t want to do a poor job of presenting an idea of someone’s father, but as soon as we were there with him, it went out the window.”

Centred on the character of Dorrigo Evans (Elordi), Narrow Road to the Deep North weaves together three timelines – just before he’s shipped off, Dorrigo embarks on an intoxicating love affair with Amy (Young), his uncle’s young wife; during the war when he and his unit endure the hardship of the Burma Railway; and in the 1980s, when Dorrigo (played by Ciaran Hinds) is an old man haunted by the memories of the past.

The scenes in the jungle, shot in New South Wales in late 2023 and early 2024, was particularly gruelling as the filmmakers tried to recreate the horrible conditions that befell the men.

Their bodies were being destroyed, as were their spirits, but there was a sense of mateship between them.

Mateship has a special place in Australian culture, a characteristic perceived as essential to our national ethos but can vary from the jingoistic and surface level to one with real poignancy.

Kurzel explained, “I was really taken by the way in which the central idea is Dorrigo is trying to keep all these men alive but eventually has to choose, in a way, who will live and who will die. I was very interested in the care and how these men nurture each other, and how they look after each other and give to each other in unfathomable, tragic circumstances.

“There’s obviously an element of mateship there, but there’s an intimacy there that I thought was unique in the book, and that was love.”

Grant wanted to explore this platonic love between men. Pointing out that he has friends going back four decades that he considers nothing less than his family, Grant saw the bonds between Narrow Road to the Deep North’s characters as intense as if they had known each other that long as well. The extremity of their situation created that glue.

“It is a beautiful thing and maybe not done enough,” Grant said. “Masculinity is obviously under the microscope at the moment, and for all the negative reasons, but there’s beauty in it. There’s a beauty in brotherhood, there’s a beauty in loyalty, and the closeness between men.

“It’s done in a really intimate, sensitive and hopefully sophisticated way. That’s what interested me because when we were pitching the show many moons ago, we would say it’s a love story, and they’re like, ‘Oh, between Amy and Dorrigo”, and we’d go, ‘No, no, not just between Amy and Dorrigo, but between those boys.”

To persuasively capture the adversity of what the men went through, Elordi, Weatherall and their castmates lost a tremendous amount of weight, reflecting, in a small way, the plight of their characters.

Energy was low on set but, similarly, the mateship was strong. Flanagan’s railway nail served as a totem for the actors, and they Elordi spoke with genuine warmth of the experience with his co-stars, all in it together no matter how they were billed.

“We loved and adored each other deeply,” he said. “You hold each other and there’s something when you’re hungry and cold and making a movie, you kind of flop together just like mammals.

“We’d just hang off each other and hold each other, and you didn’t have to speak too much because there wasn’t a heap of energy going around, but just a hand on the back of the neck or on the lower back. That, to me, was just care.”

Elordi hasn’t always been the most effusive about his past projects, having catapulted to fame in the Netflix young adult trilogy, The Kissing Booth, before joining more weighty productions. He famously riled up some fans when he appeared to distance himself from those early movies.

But he clearly feels differently about Narrow Road to the Deep North.

“I am filled with a great sense of pride, which doesn’t often happen with your work,” Elordi said. “You usually go home and you damn yourself about it. But the evolution of the show as it’s gone on, as we’ve taken it around (to Berlin Film Festival, where it was widely lauded) and stuff, I’m just filled with a great sense of pride and relief that it worked.”

Part of that is what Elordi said is his love of Australian cinema, and being in a position to be part of it, and continue its elevation at home and on a world stage. This miniseries is his first significant Australian role and likely won’t be his last.

Kurzel and Grant are stalwarts of the local industry, and have previously collaborated together on Snowtown, True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram. That Narrow Road to the Deep North is “TV”, a first for Kurzel, is not a limitation.

Grant name-checked the likes of 1995 miniseries Blue Murder and George Miller’s 1980s TV work, as aspirations, and feels they’ve accomplished that, to bring the world of cinema to people’s loungerooms.

There’s scale to Narrow Road to the Deep North, but more than that, there’s an intimacy to it. It lingers on small moments, on shots of POW bodies, on stolen looks between secret lovers, and it is all incredibly penetrating.

“These stories don’t get told often, and to tell a story of this significance with this pedigree of author, to be able to get this cast together and work with someone like Jacob, and then get Amazon to back it and take a fantastic risk on a drama, I feel really privileged that we could do it,” Kurzel said.

Elordi added, “That we can make it in Australia and it can have an impact, that’s so important”.

Narrow Road to the Deep North is on Prime Video on April 18