Jacob Elordi is known for a lot of roles. He broke out as the heartthrob in one of Netflix’s most popular movies of all time, The Kissing Booth, and earned acclaim for portraying the charming but sinister male lead on the HBO series Euphoria. He has even played Elvis. Soon we’ll know him as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and the monster in Frankenstein.

He has dabbled in plenty of genres, but none of his past work compares with his role in the grim Prime Video miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He plays an Australian soldier named Dorrigo Evans who’s captured during World War II and forced to work on the Burma Death Railway, suffering immeasurably as his memory constantly flashes back to a past love affair.

Elordi told Yahoo Entertainment that he wasn’t concerned about the violence or the emotional turmoil he’d have to endure for the character. It was compelling to him.

“As an actor, I think everyone that performs is drawn to something that is so far from your own experience. This kind of gives you all of that,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “They’re the sort of thing you want to sink your teeth into. You never want to feel like you’re just phoning it in or going through the motions. That’ll be the day, creatively, that I feel like I’ve died.”

Elordi had wanted to work with director Justin Kurzel since he was “14 or 15 … before I even knew you could be an actor.” He was moved by the “well-rounded character” that author Richard Flanagan crafted in the book that the series was adapted from, based on Flanagan’s own loved ones who endured this “horrific time in Australian history.”

Elordi transformed himself for the role, attending a six-week boot camp in the rainforest of Sydney with the other actors from the show.

“Justin had said to us early on, ‘You’ll not have another experience like this in your life, so I need you to go all the way, and I promise you you’ll remember it forever,’” he said. “We all took that to heart pretty early on, so we were bonded in a mateship from the moment we met each other. Going into the camps, we were never alone. We had all of our boys.”

They looked after each other, though it was “grueling” and they were “quite hungry a lot of the time.”

“There was this strength that got generated between all of us that I’ve not felt before,” Elordi said. “I feel really grateful to have had that experience and shared it with these boys who were initially complete strangers.”

Though he previously made headlines for speaking so casually about getting into character as Elvis for 2023’s Priscilla — eating a pound of bacon every day and only briefly studying his accent — he said he “relished the opportunity” to immerse himself in his character in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He goes to an “unconscious kind of place” when filming.

“You only have a short time to … be this other person,” Elordi said. “When I play something, and in the best way possible, it kind of does consume my entire life. I become obsessed by the whole thing, and I live every waking hour in that sort of space.”

“When I make something, I have these blanks in my memory of the time period when I was shooting from the start to the end, which is sometimes why press is so hard — I’m trying to remember what happened!” he added.

Though the brutality of The Narrow Road to the Deep North stands out in Elordi’s filmography, romance is still an essential component, as acts of violence are interspersed with memories of his character’s love affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy (Odessa Young).

In one particularly memorable love scene, Amy cuts her leg in a field and starts bleeding. Dorrigo kisses her leg, tasting the blood. Elordi said it reveals an “interesting” layer to their relationship that is “really quite powerful.”

“It’s this incredibly primal act … the act of devouring someone wholly,” Elordi said. “There’s something taboo about it, but that’s what makes it real, I suppose … the carnality of it, but also the gentleness of it — the contrast of the two in the moment … you’re not shocked when you see it, it kind of makes sense.”

Elordi said they filmed the “summer of love” scenes first, then the war.

“When I stepped into the camps, I had the very real memories of the summer of love,” he said. “On another set, you might start with a death camp, then go to Sydney and shoot a love scene. Justin really made a point of carving out the space and time so we could experience the show as fully realized as possible.”

All five episodes of The Narrow Road to the Deep North are now streaming on Prime Video.