Few filmmakers lean into their own legend as fully as the gruff, “don’t give a f*ck” director Ridley Scott, and Jacob Elordi made that clear during his recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast to promote “Frakenstein.” Scott’s blunt, old-school energy has become part of his mythos — cut fast, speak blunt, lead like a storm. So when Elordi joined Scott on his upcoming sci-fi film “The Dog Stars,” he says he expected intensity. What he wasn’t prepared for was the exact moment Scott decided to show his approval — delivered with a gesture only Ridley could pull off.
“I came out of his trailer and he just gave me the finger and said, ‘F*ck me, man, you’re all right,’” Elordi recounted with a laugh, describing the moment Scott was impressed by what he was doing on set. “Something like that. I mean, that’s all you want to hear.”
Elordi’s experience on the set became less about conventional praise and more about being enveloped in Scott’s filmmaking ethos. “He’s been plugging himself into cinema his whole life — it literally pumps through his blood,” he said. “When he arrives on set in the morning, the energy he brings carries through the duration of the shoot. He’s living off of cinema. It’s not even about the end product — it’s about the tactile act of going and making a movie.”
He compared Scott’s relentlessness to the work ethic he had instilled in his own upbringing. “He’s like my dad in a lot of ways,” Elordi explained. “My dad survives because he works. He’s a laboring man, and Ridley Scott labors on these movies. That’s what keeps the engine running. I’m literally watching cinema sustain a life, which is a pretty profound thing to be in Italy watching, you know?”
The story behind “The Dog Stars” adds even more weight to the anecdote. Adapted from the novel by Peter Heller, the film places Elordi’s character, Hig, a civilian pilot, in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a flu virus. Living in an abandoned hangar in Colorado with his dog and a former Marine, Hig’s life changes when a mysterious radio signal reopens the outside world.
The cast is stacked: Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, and Benedict Wong join Elordi under Scott’s direction. The film is slated for U.S. release on March 27, 2026.
Behind the controls of that set, the elation Elordi described had nothing to do with comfort. “He’s literally sitting there storyboarding in the car in the back of a Maybach on the way to work,” he recalled. “He directs from this trailer wrapped to look like the set, and you’ll hear this voice croak from inside — ‘Jake!’ — and then the curtain pulls back, and Oz is sitting there in a ‘Body of Lies’ bucket hat, smoking a Cuban cigar with 20 monitors in front of him. He’s cutting the movie while he’s shooting it. You walk from this camera, he cuts to that one — it’s astonishing.”
That controlled chaos finally resolved into a moment of pure cinematic affirmation. “Then [Ridley] pats me on the back and says, ‘Isn’t this what it’s about? This is what it’s about. This is it.’”
For Elordi, the whole experience reinforced why Scott has remained relevant across decades and technologies. “He’s a master craftsman,” he said. “And to see a man kept alive by the act of making — that’s the whole thing. That’s cinema.” For anyone wanting more of Elordi’s stories—from “The Dog Stars” to “Frankenstein” to his work with director Emerald Fennell—the full Happy Sad Confused interview is well worth a listen.
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