Jacob Elordi to Star in and Produce Adaptation of Mailer's The Executioner's Song

Jacob Elordi will star in and produce a film adaptation of Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 novel The Executioner's Song. The news follows Elordi's Oscar-nominated turn as the Creature in Frankenstein.

Elordi, who rose to stardom in HBO's Euphoria, will play Gary Gilmore — a fortuitous piece of casting, given the resemblance between the two men.

Who was Gary Gilmore?

Gilmore was convicted of murdering two men in Utah. He then insisted that his death sentence be carried out, despite the national moratorium on capital punishment established by the Supreme Court's Furman v. Georgia ruling, which held that states' inconsistent approaches to execution violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Gilmore fought anti-capital-punishment attorneys determined to preserve his life. He was executed by firing squad in 1977.

The novel splits into two sections: "Western Voices," tracing the forces that shaped Gilmore — including a youth spent in detention facilities in the barren American West — and "Eastern Voices," chronicling the media frenzy and national debate around the case. The second part spotlights Gilmore's relationship with celebrity photographer Lawrence "Larry" Schiller, who conducted many interviews with Gilmore, his family and others connected to the case, and who first brought the project to Mailer.

Mailer built on Schiller's research to produce a nearly 1,000-page epic in deliberately plain prose, addressing nihilism in the American West, American violence, media madness, working-class exploitation, and the cult of white male loneliness.

What did Joan Didion make of the book?

Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Joan Didion called it "an absolutely astonishing book" and noted: "The Executioner's Song did not suggest, in inception, the book it became." She observed that Mailer wrote "a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people," describing a "search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself."

Didion also found, with surprise, that the novel's strongest voices belonged to its women: "Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories."

Who is producing the film?

Schiller and Mailer collaborated as photographer-and-writer on numerous projects, beginning with 1972's Marilyn: A Biography. The Executioner's Song remains their most monumental joint work. Schiller, who directed the 1982 film adaptation starring Tommy Lee Jones, will executive-produce the new version.

The project marks Elordi's first credit as a producer rather than executive producer. Scott Stuber of United Artists and Nick Nesbitt will produce, alongside Elordi's manager Matt Vioral and Sherry Marsh.

A literary turn for Elordi

Elordi has gravitated toward literary projects. Beyond Frankenstein, for which he was nominated for every major acting award, he starred in Emerald Fennell's 2026 adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and in the Prime Video miniseries of Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He also played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla and co-starred in Ridley Scott's postapocalyptic thriller The Dog Stars.

Schiller's own legacy frames the adaptation. He was the last person to photograph Marilyn Monroe before her death, photographed Lee Harvey Oswald the night he was killed, and photographed Jack Ruby moments after Ruby killed Oswald. He shot Paul Newman and Robert Redford on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, captured the Watts riots and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, and won an Emmy in 1986 for his adaptation of Peter the Great. His photos and stories appeared in Life, Paris Match, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post.

With Gilmore's story returning to the screen under a producer-star at the height of his awards momentum, the adaptation positions one of Mailer's most demanding books for a new generation of viewers.