Why Nate From Euphoria Looks So Familiar
Week-in and week-out, HBO's "Euphoria" has been simultaneously delighting, surprising, and horrifying fans with each new installment of the show's second season. Originally premiering in 2019, the series follows a teenage girl named Rue (Zendaya) who suffers from drug addiction, along with her friends and high school classmates, who harbor dark secrets and complex relationships with one another that make the warring characters of "Game of Thrones" all seem like good buddies. As time goes on, the drama between the characters only gets more and more disturbing and dangerous.
In the relatively short time that it's been around, the series has garnered a massive following and has become renowned for its gorgeous cinematography and nail-biting drama. Much of that latter element, however, actually owes to one particularly notorious character: Nate Jacobs. Played by Jacob Elordi, the volatile and manipulative teenage boy Nate serves as one of the primary antagonists of the series. While many fans love to hate Nate, some may wonder why the character looks so familiar to them. As it turns out, Elordi has also popped up in some other notable movies from recent years that "Euphoria" fans may remember.
Elordi plays a different high school bad-boy in The Kissing Booth movies
Over a year before he was causing trouble as Nate on "Euphoria," Jacob Elordi was already embroiled in plenty of high school drama as part of the fervently popular Netflix romantic comedy "The Kissing Booth." The movie centers upon a teenage girl named Elle (Joey King) who sparks a new romance with her best friend's oldest brother Noah (Elordi) after the two share an intimate moment during the school's kissing booth fundraiser. The movie also spawned two sequels, which Elordi also starred in, with the third movie wrapping up the trilogy in 2021.
The best way to describe Elordi's performance as Noah to "Euphoria" fans is that he's basically playing a version of Nate that isn't absolutely depraved. Like Nate, Elordi's Noah is a popular, athletic bad-boy with anger issues, but rather than being corrupted to the core, he actually has a good heart. Despite his overprotective and aggressive tendencies, Noah actually grows as a character throughout the films, making several selfless decisions by the end of the saga in order for Elle to have a bright future. In the wake of "Euphoria," however, it is admittedly a bit hard to watch Elordi in these movies without thinking he has some sort of deeply villainous ulterior motive.
The actor faced some gross-out body horror in The Mortuary Collection
Horror buffs may remember the 2019 movie "The Mortuary Collection," which debuted as a Shudder Original on AMC's horror-focused streaming service. In the vein of properties like "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark," the film had an anthology format, containing several smaller vignette stories within a framing narrative. The second of the segments, titled "Unprotected," put Jacob Elordi front-and-center in a bizarre story that is absolutely not for the faint of heart ... or stomach.
Set in the 1960s, the story sees Elordi play a stereotypical college frat boy named Jake. Jake hooks up with a woman named Sandra at a party but removes his condom without her knowledge while they're having sex. Soon after the fact, he begins exhibiting signs of male pregnancy and turns to Sandra's family for help, admitting his breach of consent. In a sequence that rivals the infamous "Alien" chest-burster scene in terms of pure gross-out factor, Jake births a monster-baby, resulting in the gory destruction of his genitals and stomach and his subsequent demise. Again, not a particularly comfortable watching experience.
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He made a noble sacrifice in 2 Hearts
"The Kissing Booth" trilogy of movies aren't the only romance-centric credits Elordi has to his name, as the actor also starred in the critically-maligned 2020 film "2 Hearts." Based on a true story, the movie followed the love stories of two separate men, Chris Gregory (played by Jacob Elordi) and Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto). While the two narratives are temporally and spatially disparate from one another for most of the movie, they eventually collide together when Chris suffers a major brain aneurysm and Jorge ends up needing a lung transplant. Chris, an organ donor, is revealed to be a suitable candidate for Jorge's transplant, and through his own death, ends up saving Jorge's life.
It's pretty much as cheesy as a romantic tearjerker movie can get, but it was admittedly refreshing to see Elordi play a purely good-natured character for once. Out of all of his roles so far and the many more that are sure to come in the future, Elordi's appearance in "2 Hearts" will likely remain an obscure chapter in the actor's career.