Jacob Elordi isn’t interested in the actor fairytale anymore, the one where the craft is so sacred that even misery on set is supposed to feel like a gift. In a candid conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow for Variety (watch below), the star took aim at one of the most overused lines in the business and treated it like the kind of lie you only believe until you’ve lived long enough inside the machine.
Elordi said the old mantra about set life being inherently better than real life is a convenient fantasy that collapses the moment the work turns sour. “The worst day on a movie set is still better than the best day in the real world. And that’s bullshit,” he said.
He explained that the emotional toll of a bad day can cut deeper precisely because the environment is so professionally padded. “The best day in the real world absolutely” beats the worst day on set, he said. Elordi then made the point unmistakable with a scorched-earth version of the same idea. “That’s a f*cking lie,” he added.
He also described the specific kind of self-conscious humiliation that can creep in when you realize you’re not connecting with the material or yourself. Elordi recalled the feeling of being trapped in the wrong moment, watching his own performance from a distance. “I felt like my bones were on fire,” he said, before describing the brutal internal monologue that can follow. “I was looking at myself from the outside on these sets, just go home. You should have tomatoes thrown at you. You’re an embarrassment.”
That honesty dovetailed with a broader admission that the work can start to blur into obligation if you don’t guard the spark. Elordi said that before one of his more recent projects, he could feel passion slipping into routine. “I was getting to a point too where I wasn’t really very excited,” he said. “Work was becoming work in a way.”
He framed that shift as a warning sign rather than a dramatic crisis, acknowledging the strange guilt of feeling disconnected from a job so many people dream about. “You are so lucky that somebody’s paying the rent on the building for you to go in and do your silly little song and dance in there,” he said. “So the fact that I was sitting there kind of laboring over it, that’s where I knew something was wrong.”
Elordi also zoomed out to the bigger picture, worrying about the cultural fragility of the medium itself. “My great fear is that movies lose their currency or something and we don’t have that form of storytelling anymore,” he said.
On the TV side, the conversation briefly turned to his return to “Euphoria.” When asked about what comes next, Elordi suggested the new chapter has already been in motion. “There’s another one I finished filming just recently and its a completely different thing,” he said. When Paltrow asked if his character might be kinder this time around, he offered a cautious tease. “I actually think so,” he said.
He immediately followed that optimism with the kind of humility that keeps the whole exchange grounded, acknowledging that even big swings can feel uncertain while you’re still too close to them. “Whether it works or not, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a chance that whatever we’ve done is just not, well, what I’ve done is not good.”
Taken together, Elordi sounds like an actor trying to protect the thing that got him here in the first place, while refusing to dress up the hardest parts of the job as a fairy tale.
