The Cannes Film Festival was close to having a 6-foot-5 movie star serving on its competition jury.
Jacob Elordi, who has been on a busy spell with back-to-back-to-back projects like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and the new season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, was confirmed for a spot on the jury under president Park Chan-wook. But the actor broke his foot, making the appointment nearly impossible due to the physical demands of hoofing it up and down the Palais steps and shuttling back and forth to screenings and jury commitments.
News of Elordi’s foot injury was first reported by Page Six. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the injury through a source. A rep for the actor did not return a request for comment.
It’s not his first physical challenge, however. During The Hollywood Reporter’s actor roundtable, Elordi confirmed that a back injury halted his rugby career and kickstarted his transition to acting. Then, while filming Wuthering Heights, he ended up in the hospital for second-degree burns from a shower mishap.
“The full story is that, when I was doing Frankenstein, I had so much make-up in my fingers and in my feet all the time, and I left it on for the whole shoot because I couldn’t be bothered washing it all off,” he told Esquire. “As Heathcliff [in Wuthering Heights], I was covered in mange and dirt, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to do that again, I’m going to clean my feet properly every night and come in to work fresh the next day.’ So I went to clean my feet, and I leaned back and my back seared into the steam knob and I stood up screaming; it tore up my back. When I went to work on Monday, I had a second-degree burn.”
As previously announced, the South Korean filmmaker will serve as jury president alongside Demi Moore, who got a boost from the Cannes debut of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance; Ruth Negga whose Loving premiered in competition in 2016; French star and Cannes regular Isaach De Bankolé; Stellan Skarsgård, who returns to the Croisette following last year’s triumph in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value; Hamnet filmmaker Chloé Zhao, whose 2015 feature debut, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, screened in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight; Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes, whose debut The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo won last year’s Un Certain Regard Prize; Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel, an Un Certain Regard winner for Playground; and Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, Ken Loach’s long-time collaborator who penned two Palme d’Or winners (The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake).
The nine-member jury will award the Palme d’Or to one of the 22 films in competition at a ceremony on May 23. The 79th Cannes Film Festival runs May 12-23.