“If I saw someone who looked like Jacob Elordi, I wouldn’t be mad,” says Milla, one of the spectators of Saturday’s Jacob Elordi lookalike competition, which is occurring on the lawn of the State Library of Victoria in the middle of a heatwave. The only thing hotter than the weather, apparently, is Australian actor Jacob Elordi.
“The dating pool in Melbourne is not that great,” she continues. “I think that he is a very attractive man, and if you look like him, then you are also an attractive man.” Another spectator, fanning themselves furiously as they wait for the contest to start, tells me that while they aren’t a fan of his acting, they like “free events” and want to “see some hot guys”.
Unfortunately, as time passes, it becomes increasingly clear that the couple of dozen attendees might be out of luck: there’s not only a conspicuous absence of anyone who looks like Jacob Elordi, but any men at all to compete for the $50 prize.
Elordi is not the first young handsome white man to have a look alike contest – in fact, in the great Australian tradition of being slightly behind every cultural trend, he joins the tail end of the phenomenon. The somewhat baffling movement, reminiscent of the flashmob debacle from the naughties but hornier and sillier, began in October with a Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition in New York. What started as an event poster affixed to a lone streetlight quickly went viral, with YouTuber Anthony Po eventually incurring a $500 fine for hosting the event, which featured not only more than 300 contestants and an arrest, but Timothée Chalamet himself.
Since then, we’ve seen similar competitions all around the world: Paul Mescal in Dublin, Harry Styles in London, Jeremy Allen White in Chicago (where the prize was “$50 cash and some cigarettes”). The competitions tend to happen in cities that have some connection to the stars – hence Melbourne, where the Brisbane-born Elordi attended St Kevin’s College.
The organiser of the event, Alicia Liang-Morgan is unfazed by the lack of potential contestants, telling Guardian Australia that she had five people sign up, most of them her friends. None of them came.
“It was obviously very disorganised, but that’s the way it is. That’s the way it was originally meant to be, and that’s the way I kept it.”
There’s something very Australian about the lack of seriousness with which anyone is taking this event. Another group of girls tell me that they saw a poster for the event on an electrical pole and decided to come for a laugh.
Meanwhile, Alicia and her friends have decided to comb the rest of the park for eligible contestants. They find a guy named Ali, who looks nothing like Elordi, but feels as if he might spiritually “be a Jacob”.
“I work at the library – I’m on my lunch break,” he says. “How long is this going to take?”
It turns out it takes too long, and Ali has to go back to work – but not before telling the Guardian that while he has never watched Jacob Elordi in anything, he thought the Australian version of The Office was “pretty good”.
Finally a group of young men have been found “on a bench”, and lured by the potential $50 prize.
“I think we’re a very loose interpretation of Jacob Elordi at best,” says one of them, Mason. I ask in what way they feel they resemble the star.
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“Being Australian,” says Mason.
“Male?” says his competitor, Daniel.
But when the judging begins, there’s one incredibly clear and obvious winner: a student named Maxxie, who does actually look credibly like Jacob Elordi.
“I’m blown away,” says Alicia. “It’s crazy that a guy literally found off the street ended up looking more like Jacob Elordi than anybody we could have hoped for.”
Maxxie had come to see the competition, but had no intention of entering it, and given there seems to be more media than actual attenders here, it’s difficult to land an interview. But when the Guardian finally gets to speak to the winner, he says he isn’t letting it get to his head.
“I’d say it feels flattering, but I know it’s not real. I know I don’t look like him at all, I’m just tall.”