Jacob Elordi may be ready for The Kissing Booth madness to die down. The 23-year-old actor stars as Noah Flynn in Netflix’s franchise — the first film was released in 2018, the second last month, and the third’s due out next year — but his comments appear to suggest that he wants to move on from the teen flicks.
360aproko spoke with Elordi before Netflix revealed that the third movie in the franchise had already been shot and was due out next year. Despite his knowledge of this at the time of the interview, he didn’t seem enthused about participating in a third movie.
“So many of these things end with cliffhangers, you kind of leave it up for interpretation,” he said. “Myself personally, I don’t know what I’m doing after this phone call, so [I’m] not sure how to answer [if I’ll be in a third movie]… I have no idea.”
The cliffhanger Elordi’s referring to revolves around whether Elle (Joey King) will continue in her relationship with him, or if she’ll be swayed away to Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the new kid in school she shared a kiss with in the second movie. While Marco’s final scene seems to suggest that he’s going to pursue Elle, Elordi thought his onscreen rival should let it go and the franchise should call it quits.
“I feel like if you get told no, you should take the no, you know?” Elordi said of Elle rejecting Marco. “Take the L, man, give up. Like, leave her alone, you know?”
While Elordi seemed clear on the plot of Kissing Booth 2, the actor shocked fans when he said he hadn’t actually seen the flick.
“I haven’t seen it. You’ve seen more than I have,” he told Variety. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that, but I haven’t. Do you like it?”
When the interviewer said they liked it better than the first one, Elordi replied, “That’s so kind of you.”
After Elordi’s comment about not seeing the sequel, King, his real-life ex-girlfriend, shot down her co-star’s claim in a since-deleted tweet.
“Jacob watched it. He’s capping,” she wrote, later revealing that she got Elordi’s permission to post the tweet, but decided to delete it due to her use of the word “capping.”
Due to their past relationship, many fans speculated that making more Kissing Booth flicks would be hard for Elordi and King. Though he hasn’t spoken to that specifically, Elordi did discuss pressures of dating in the public eye.
“Just even the fact that somebody you don’t know knows your name could be quite disembodying. But then eventually, for me personally, it’s got nothing to do with me, you know,” he told 360aproko. “Imagine the store around the corner from where you are now. Whatever people are talking about is not your business, it’s kind of how it feels.”
“Unfortunately, it just has my name involved in it but it literally has nothing to do with me,” he added. “It just doesn’t affect the trajectory of my life. So I just kind of ignore it.”
In an interview with GQ Australia, Elordi further spoke to his complicated relationship with fame, something he became well acquainted with after the release of the first film.
“It was super intense for a little while. Overnight you couldn’t really go anywhere, but it’s been two years now and it’s died down considerably,” he said. “I’d love to be able to create films in a bubble where nobody knows who the actor is. They might still love the films, but somehow they couldn’t put a name to the face or something. That would be really cool.”
In addition to his love life, another facet of his life that’s been the talk of fans thanks to the franchise is his body, a fact that made him “terribly nervous.”
“I trained extensively for the first film, because it said it in the script,” he told Men’s Health last month. “I was so terribly nervous that I wouldn’t be what the script wanted me to be.”
“At the time, I was super young and got thrown into a world where everyone wanted to talk about my body… it really f**king bothered me,” he added. “I don’t identify with that whatsoever. I was trying to prove myself and be known as an actor. It was so much working out and I hated every second of it.”
Making the Kissing Booth movies impacted Elordi’s personal life, relationships and his body, all for a character he wasn’t too excited to dive into anymore.
“Nothing against that but I’ve sort of done it and it would be really hard for me to find joy in that,” he told GQ Australia of playing a high school student. “I’m also getting older now, and I’m starting to look older, so to keep going back to high school is kind of taxing.”
