To prepare, Elordi read Priscilla’s book, eBayed old DVDs of Elvis’s performances, and watched YouTube videos until he was certain he had seen nearly every piece of available footage that existed of the man. As with all his characters, he kept an extensive notebook. He spoke to Priscilla on the phone, and they bonded over their love of animals, he says.

Spaeny and Elordi also ended up connecting over animals. She suggested that the two of them go horseback riding for their first meeting, since it was an activity that Elvis and Priscilla enjoyed.

“He was bonding with the horses. He’s a real animal man,” Spaeny told me. “There was a story that he told me one time where he caught a hawk with his bare hands that flew into his apartment and he had a spiritual moment with the hawk. I’m like, ‘Only you, Jacob.’”

And then there was the matter of the infamous Elvis voice. Mess that up and you’re never living it down. Coppola told me that Elordi stayed in the voice the entire time he was on set. For Elordi, it was mostly a practical choice. “There’s all these layers and hoops that you have to jump through to get to that voice,” he explains. “So for me personally to be dropping out my voice and then coming in, it’s not going to work.”

Priscilla, for one, approved. “She said I got the voice right,” Elordi says, “which was everything I needed to get.” (His voice bears no traces of Elvis-speak today.)

While Elordi does portray Elvis in his older years, you never see him get fully bloated. Not that Elordi didn’t try. “It was the first time in my life that I ever had a gut,” he says, pleased. His eyes glimmer, almost in a reverie, when he recalls his process. “Bacon. It was about a pound of bacon every day. And then when I’d go to Canada” – where Priscilla was primarily filmed – “it was poutine and hamburgers… It’s really my pleasure. I could order Uber Eats and be like, ‘Should I get that burger after I’ve just had Italian? Yeah. Yeah, I will.’”

For all the hard work the role required, filming Priscilla was not a tormented experience. Coppola, whom Elordi had long admired and with whom he’d wanted to work, had a pickleball court set up on set for the cast and crew to occupy themselves with during downtime.

“It was always really hilarious watching Jacob in his full Elvis gear with all of his gold and his coiffed hair,” Spaeny told me, “playing pickleball in between these really intense scenes.” Coppola once joked that she had considered auctioning off a pickleball tournament with Elordi to raise more funding for the film. “I’d do anything for Sofia Coppola,” Elordi says to that prospect. “It’s pretty fun to completely trust somebody, ’cause it just alleviates so much stress and worry.”

I ask him if that’s been his usual experience with directors.

“Not at all,” he says. “Not once up until now.”

Long before he was premiering films in Venice, rubbing shoulders with Richard Gere, and getting mobbed in Manhattan, Elordi’s first big break was as the Cat in the Hat in his school’s production of Seussical.

Acting had not previously been on his radar, but others saw promise. He grew up working-class in Brisbane. His dad was a house painter and his mum worked in the cafeteria at his school. Elordi adores his mum, brings her up constantly, and sweetly calls her “the finest person I know.” A teacher had encouraged him to try out for his first play. Sometime after, his mum began to have an inkling that this would become her son’s vocation.

Little by little, he set his sights on Hollywood. Elordi had, since he was 14, been working on an American accent. “I think I just wanted to be able to mimic the people that I thought were cool,” he says.

“Like who?” I ask, thinking of any number of the classic actors he had spoken of admiring.

“Probably Vin Diesel,” he admits.

Post-high school, he had some success landing small projects. And then came his breakout role in 2018’s The Kissing Booth, a Netflix teen rom-com in which he played a bad-boy jock with washboard abs who also gets into Harvard, which filmed in South Africa. After flying over, he figured, what the hell, why not continue travelling until he reached Los Angeles? The Kissing Booth also made him an overnight sensation, so he went ahead and filmed two sequels. Here he was, starring in movies! Achieving global fame, just like he’d always wanted! And… pretty much hating all of it.

Many young actors have had to navigate the thorny path from teen-movie heart-throb to serious thespian. But it still made Elordi miserable.

“I didn’t want to make those movies before I made those movies,” he says. “Those movies are ridiculous. They’re not universal. They’re an escape.”

It does make sense that he took The Kissing Booth. He did need a job – and, I point out, it fits into a “one for them, one for me” ethos that can be fairly commonplace in Hollywood.

“That one’s a trap as well. Because it can become 15 for them, none for you. You have no original ideas and you’re dead inside. So it’s a fine dance,” he replies. “My ‘one for them,’ I’ve done it.”

That sense is freeing for Elordi. He has finally arrived at the harmonious place in his career where his ambitions and his reality have more or less aligned. If he could, he would stay here forever, being in films, working with directors he adores. “That’s probably why I’m so happy, because now judgment and comments on the internet and stuff, it’s…” He trails off, searching for the right sentiment.

“I’m in the movie now,” Elordi finishes.

As we meander around the West Village, Elordi points out a pool bar he likes to go to with a friend in the neighbourhood. Not two minutes later, he spots that same friend across the street. “Come here!” Elordi shouts, waving at a silhouette in the distance.

You get a sense that this is what life is often like for Elordi – a series of charmed coincidences, the universe rearranging itself so that what he wants happens precisely when he wants it to.

The friend, a rakish long-haired painter named Marko Ristic, makes a mad dash over. They connected years ago through a mutual friend in Los Angeles, soon after Elordi arrived. He slept on Ristic’s couch and they would hang out for days on end, watching films and tooling around.

“When we met, it felt like a childhood friend again. There was an innocence to it and also a connection over a lot of things, predominantly film,” Ristic says. “It’s quite surreal. Now, with him, when people come to him, it’s that –” He pantomimes someone shoving a phone in his face to take a photo.

Elordi needed this friendship when he first crash-landed on these shores. He was disoriented. To the outside observer who might innocently assume that Australia and Los Angeles have similar vibes – temperate weather, tanned beauties, plentiful avocado toast – Elordi will immediately set you straight. “If Australians are like freshwater fish, Americans are saltwater fish,” he says. “It kind of looks the same. The water is water, you’re swimming around, but you can’t breathe.”

There’s something about the camaraderie in Australia – mateship, as he puts it – that he found to be lacking in America when he arrived. “The isolation is a big thing. When I first moved here, everyone was very closed in on themselves. It seemed like ordering a coffee was like a standoff. You know?” he says.

“With the barista?” I ask, confused.

“Everyone. With people in line, walking into the coffee shop, the barista. It was very guarded. Everything’s very guarded,” he says. In Australia, “a coffee shop is sacred.” Imagine: an entire nation drinking their flat whites together in harmony.

“When I’m in America, I feel like I’m killing time waiting for my real life to begin,” Elordi adds with a sigh. “And I spend all my time here.”

Right now he’s peripatetic – bouncing around wherever filming brings him, and trying to get back home to Australia as much as possible.