“I’m just burning sage,” says Jacob Elordi as he takes a lighter to the business end of a smudge stick. His voice, transmitted over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, is so deep that the words tend to blur together, as if this 1.98m-tall Aussie, in a baseball cap and a banana-yellow T-shirt, has been possessed by the spirit of Eeyore. Or it might just be how he’s feeling today. “A little down in the dumps,” he says. He dearly misses his family back in Australia: his brother and sister, both older, and “my best friends”—his HBO’s acid trip of a series that gives Gen Z the prestige treatment. “Work is the North Star. As long as I’m doing that, I’m good. I can be anyone, anywhere, from any family,” he says. “But it’s the in-between moments. There are days when you just sit at home, and those days are tough. Because it’s like, ‘I have a swimming pool and a television and a couch and a tree, and I can’t have Sunday lunch with my mum.’ ”
