Jacob Elordi Recalls His Shower Accident While Filming Wuthering Heights

Jacob Elordi’s characters have a torrid history with bathrooms, from Nate and Cassie’s chaotic hookup on Euphoria to the Saltburn self-love bathtub scene that spawned one seriously questionable candle. But as Elordi revealed in a recent interview, an off-set mishap during production on Wuthering Heights took this steamy track record to new, painfully literal heights.

Elordi’s Shower Shock

Chatting with Wuthering Heights writer and director Emerald Fennell for Esquire, Elordi joked that he was inspired to infuse real pain into his portrayal of the troubled Heathcliff after a conversation with makeup artist Siân Miller.

“She challenged me: ‘If Daniel Day-Lewis was playing Heathcliff, he would have come in with scars,’” Elordi recalled in the interview, published on Jan. 30. “I said, ‘Well I’m going to go away and maim myself on the weekend to prove to you that I’m Heathcliff!’”

Of course, Elordi might not have expected that to pan out, but that night, he did, in fact, get hurt while taking a steam shower at his house for the shoot. “I went to clean my feet, and I leant back, and my back seared into the steam knob, and I stood up screaming; it tore up my back,” he said. “When I went to work on Monday, I had a second-degree burn.”

Fennell recalled the incident from the first week of filming, saying that producer Josey McNamara texted her that Elordi was in the hospital. “Obviously, I thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s had a car accident,’” Fennell said. “And then he was like, ‘He’s burnt his back in the shower.’ I was like, ‘You know what, Josey? Start with that.’”

The filmmaker joked that Elordi felt the spirit of Day-Lewis — the three-time Oscar winner known for his immersive approach to acting — in that moment. (And indeed, Margot Robbie has called her co-lead “our generation’s Daniel Day-Lewis.”)

Method In The Moors

Elordi’s shower mishap may have inadvertently helped him channel Heathcliff’s pain, but there are other, gentler ways the Wuthering Heights cast tapped into their characters’ mindsets. As Robbie recently shared with Today, Fennell placed shrines of Robbie and Elordi in each other’s dressing rooms during filming, seemingly in an attempt to reinforce Catherine and Heathcliff’s obsessive feelings for each other.

“It was so unhinged, and so hilarious,” Robbie said. “She put locks of hair and pictures of us, candles ... she kind of set the bar, and we just kept trying to meet the bar after that.”