Returning to Australia to make The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Jacob Elordi discovered an immediacy in his acting he hadn't felt for almost a decade.
The Brisbane-born star launched his international career with The Kissing Booth in 2018, followed by the hit series Euphoria.
By 2023 he was seriously famous, starring in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn and playing Elvis in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.
But that same year, the rising Hollywood heart-throb had a rare chance to play the uniquely Australian character Dorrigo Evans and with it came a welcome sense of familiarity.
"There's kind of immediacy in the performance, there's no veneer that you need to create - if you're playing an American or a British person, there's a history there I don't have in my bones," he said.
"That kind of ease is something I haven't experienced so much working overseas ... it feels more natural."
The Narrow Road to the Deep North has been adapted from Richard Flanagan's award-winning novel into a miniseries written by Shaun Grant and directed by Justin Kurzel.
It spans three distinct time periods - a pre-war Dorrigo who falls for his uncle's young wife (played by Odessa Young), his time as a POW on the Thai-Burma death railway and finally as an admired surgeon and war hero (played by Ciaran Hinds).
The production features an impressive cast with Young, Olivia DeJonge, Simon Baker, Essie Davis, Heather Mitchell and Thomas Weatherall.
It's a war story interwoven with a tale of love, manhood and memory, and while playing an Australian character may have been refreshing for Elordi, making the five-part series wasn't easy.
He and dozens of supporting actors had to lose a dramatic amount of weight to reflect the emaciated physicality of the prisoners forced to work to the point of exhaustion on the railway on a diet of gruel.
About 13,000 Australians were among the Allied prisoners used as forced labour by the Japanese during WWII to construct a railway linking Thailand and Burma.
For director Justin Kurzel, the sheer physical state of his actors meant he had to film economically, deploying spontaneous shoots and longer takes.
"We wanted to do it quickly for the boys and not stuff around ... so they weren't in this state for too long," he said
"What I really got from the actors was an enormous sense of pride in what they sacrificed, what that represented and how they supported each other."
Later episodes feature confronting depictions of war crimes and gut-churning medical scenes.
About 2800 Australian POWs died on the railway - some were tortured, while others suffered beri-beri, cholera, malaria or dysentery.
During his research, Elordi unearthed contemporaneous medical journals and inspected antique surgical equipment at the Australian War Memorial. He also read Flanagan's Man Booker Prize-winning novel.
"Sometimes the book finds you at the time that you're supposed to read it and touches you in a profound way," he said.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North won plaudits at the Berlin Film Festival in February and cinema showings of the first two episodes have been held locally.
It's cinema but will ultimately be viewed on the small screen - the complexity of the novel suited a longer format, according to Kurzel, who relished the local audience at Monday's premiere in Sydney.
The series launches on Prime Video on April 18.
