The Sydney Opera House looms in the background, as Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young join the Zoom call from an upmarket Circular Quay hotel. The actors have logged on to discuss The Narrow Road to the Deep North, their long-awaited Australian homecoming.
Neither the strong-jawed Brisbanite or the elegant Sydneysider have appeared in a homegrown project since 2020, but it’s always been on Elordi’s mind. “Coming home was so important,” he says, adding that the five-part limited series is “everything that I’ve ever wanted to do as an actor.”
The highly-anticipated adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel is a harrowing examination of an indelible part of Australia’s national identity – the Thai-Burma Death Railway.
Like many Gen Zers, Elordi and Young had limited knowledge of the experience of the 2,815 Australian POWs who, between October 1942 and October 1943, died deep in the malarial jungle while building a railway for the Imperial Japanese forces.
“In terms of the Australian experience on the Thai-Burmese railway, I didn’t know much about it,” Young admits. Elordi cited The Bridge on the River Kwai and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence as part of his “cinematic education” on life as a POW under the thumb of the Japanese in Southeast Asia.
Image: Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young in The Narrow Road to the Deep North Credit: Prime Video
Elordi plays the young Dorrigo Evans, an Australian medical student whose memory of a brief but passionate affair with Young’s Amy Mulvaney – his uncle’s wife – sustains and haunts him during his torturous time on the railway.
The older Dorrigo is played by the magisterial Ciarán Hinds, who may not be an aged mirror image of Elordi, but as a now-wealthy surgeon, reluctant war hero and spectre of his younger self, the Irishman evokes a like-for-like soulful sullenness. Decades later, the memory of Amy and the railway remains ever-present in his churning mind.
Directing Elordi, Young and Hinds is one of Australia’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Justin Kurzel, who, after a few technical difficulties, reveals over Zoom that he grew up in the shadow of a man like Dorrigo.
His grandfather was one of the ‘Rats of Tobruk’, an outnumbered garrison of Australian soldiers who held the Libyan deep-sea port for eight barbarous months despite being surrounded by Axis forces. Kurzel says his grandfather’s memory of the horrors of Tobruk enveloped him with a “fog of war” that adversely affected his partner and children.
Kurzel’s previous outings include the grisly Snowtown, his directorial debut based on the shocking “bodies in barrels” murders, and the disquieting Nitram, which traced the events leading up to the infamous Port Arthur massacre.
Like no other Australian director, Kurzel explores the complexities of the country’s national identity, its historical trauma, and the myths that shape its collective consciousness. Yet, despite this familiarity with depicting some of the darkest chapters in Australian history, he was still “quite apprehensive” about directing an adaptation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Aside from the pressure of being a “good mate” with the novel’s revered author, Richard Flanagan, the difficulty Kurzel found in adapting a book and bringing its pages to life on screen was that “you have to make it your own.” One thing he and his frequent scribe, Shaun Grant, sought to preserve was the “DNA” of the source material – and how “the different timelines overlap.”
Unlike Kurzel and Grant’s previous collaborations on Snowtown or Nitram, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is as sensual as it is shell-shocking. The director was struck by the novel’s “summer of love” and how Dorrigo, in turning to the memory of Amy during his POW experience, the free-spirited, strong-willed Aphrodite “becomes almost bigger than the relationship that they had.”
Kurzel wanted to improvise some of the material in Amy’s love scenes, so he was looking for an actor who was “incredibly inventive and playful” – the “exciting” Young was a natural fit. He then brought her onto the already-in-production The Order so they could build a rapport before filming The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Describing Kurzel as a “very intuitive” and “impulsive director” who loves to “make a scene based on his feeling and vision,” Young might have been intimidated by his penchant for improvisation if she hadn’t worked with him before. But owing to him being a “freeing and trusting person” who gave “gentle and nuanced” direction, Young delivers a performance so searing it’s reminiscent of Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm.
Image: Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young in The Narrow Road to the Deep North Credit: Prime Video
Elordi, meanwhile, had never collaborated with Kurzel before, but the director knew the Hollywood ‘It Boy’ would be “perfect” as the young Dorrigo, noting his onscreen “grace and dignity.” The choice pays off as Elordi, with a Brando-like turn, further establishes himself as a mature character actor.
Elordi recounts how working with Kurzel was an “actor’s delight” and a “case of why you should meet your heroes.” The self-professed Australian cinema cinephile “hopes to make many films with Justin [Kurzel],” as he “creates such an immersive experience on set.”
There was also a “two-week rehearsal period where we sat around a long table, drank coffee, did movement, talked about the dialogue, and talked about our own lives.” To Elordi, “you have to enter” this type of space if you want to make a work like The Narrow Road to the Deep North feel “real.” He was “lucky that Odessa [Young] is the kind of actor that wants to live in that space with you.”
Nothing feels more real in the limited series than Kurzel’s rendering of life on the railway as a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. He wants to “take us back to that time,” and in the gloom of night, as cauldrons of flames flicker, warding off the tigers who stalk the jungle, emaciated ghouls shuffle, open sores weep with pus, mud flows with excrement and sword’s sink into skin. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a vision of hell so visceral, many will recoil from its horrors.
The older Dorrigo knows that these horrors mustn’t be forgotten: “Memory is the only true justice. It’s our only defence against repeating the misery of history.” For Elordi, this is the power of art – and why it’s the “only thing that we have that can transcend all the bullshit and cut through to the core of what it is to be a human being.”
Prime Video Australia and Prime Video New Zealand will release The Narrow Road to the Deep North on Friday, April 18th.
From Variety AU/NZ
