August 27, 2026 — 11:00am“You know, dogs for me are easier for me to act with than people,” says Jacob Elordi, who plays opposite a dog for a good portion of Sir Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars.Like all his answers, this one is slow and considered; Elordi doesn’t do throwaway lines.“Because they never lie,” he goes on. “This dog is incredibly well-trained. Her sole job is responding to me, so it was kind of an easy task. [And] because her focus is entirely on me, she’s entirely dedicated between action and cut. The word ‘Action’ makes her spring to life and ‘Cut’ is when she knows she gets a reward. So in the scene, she’s probably the truest scene partner I’ve had.”His director nods approvingly. “Dogs never lie!” Scott says. “Very true.”Elordi’s bond with Jasper, a frisky Belgian Malinois, opens up some breathing space in this latest take on the end of the world as we know it, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel.Hig (Elordi) lives in a remote camp a couple of hours’ flying time from what used to be Denver, now a deserted ruin since a virus killed all but a few survivors. The dog is the sole remaining member of Hig’s family; his wife died with their unborn child, leaving him consumed with grief.Jacob Elordi as Hig with his trusty canine companion Jasper in The Dog Stars.Fabio LovinoAlong with Jasper, he works alongside his compadre Bangley (Josh Brolin), a disagreeable former soldier who – as Hig observes – suits and even enjoys life on the edge of annihilation. Bangley picks off lone raiders from his lookout tower. Larger groups of ferals are seething out there somewhere, waiting to kill them.It’s a fiercely lonely life, out of any town on an old airstrip, surrounded by hulks of light planes, one of which Hig has pressed into service. He flies into Denver – landing in the empty main street – to loot abandoned shops, hospitals and petrol bowsers, maybe calling in on his old house, which remains exactly as he left it, still with clean sheets on the bed. On the way back, he might call in on a nearby colony of Mennonites, who exchange their vegetables for his mechanical skills, much to Bangley’s chagrin; any one of them, he argues, could be carrying disease. He sneers at them, but has his own religious calling: to save his own skin.Heller’s vision of a future dystopia has ceased to feel fanciful in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Actually, says Scott – who watches the world news at least twice a day – it is not even a future. “People are living apocalyptic lives right now. We won’t go into that because it will become political, but how stupid are we to ignore it, right?” he says.“We are just the fortunate few who don’t have to experience that, but we see it. It’s there. And I think, in a heartbeat, we could be there.”Elordi as Hig and Josh Brolin as Bangley: Ridley Scott describes them as the Odd Couple.Fabio LovinoElordi as Hig is calm, dogged, morose. “Hig is not a superhero,” observes the actor. “He’s not a soldier. He’s not a marine.”Nor, for that matter, is he a romantic antihero like Heathcliff or Frankenstein’s monster.“Mundane is the wrong word, but this is a very real apocalypse,” Elordi says. “And as he says in the film, he’s just a mechanic, a normal guy. He’s probably the closest thing to just a man that I’ve played in a while.”How would Elordi get along in a collapsed world? “I mean, it’s probably not for me,” he says, almost apologetically. “Everyone has this fantasy that they’d survive the apocalypse, and they’d live it out with their guns and their bunkers and ammunition, but I think we’ll probably all just die.”Elordi with Margaret Qualley in The Dog Stars.Fabio LovinoWhen gangs close in on their compound, Hig goes in search of the source of an occasional radio signal he has picked up in the plane, a journey into the unknown that takes him first to a crash landing at the remains of a ranch.Here, in a hidden valley, Pops (Guy Pearce) and his adult daughter Cima (Margaret Qualley) are carrying on as decent a life as they can. The magnificence of the surrounding country – actually the Dolomites in northern Italy – is a visual counterpoint to the story’s bleakness.“It’s stunning, isn’t it?” says Pearce at a press conference for the film. “You’re aware when you read the book and read the script that [nature] is a voice in the story itself. Then you turn up, and you go ‘wow, here it all is’. It does half the work for you.”His fellow actors agree, fervently. “Remember how muddy it was?” says Brolin. “You’d get these rains. It felt like [doing] a David Attenborough.”Unlike most of his recent roles, such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Elordi says his character in The Dog Stars is an “everyman”.APHig and the ranchers then find their way to an airbase where a strange congregation of dazed people seem to be acting out the last gasp of The Great Gatsby, strung out on cocktails and dancing and ordered about by a fearsome matriarch in a vintage Pan Am hostess uniform (Alison Janney). Like the other settings, it is real; there were no CGI scenes or backdrops.“I forget where that was, up north somewhere: an airbase with private aircraft,” says Scott. It was his own idea of a living hell. “Anyone with a private plane has to have some form of wealth, so certainly that becomes interesting. Why are they there? Why are they all half-gaga?” The answers are the essence of dystopian horror.As a filmmaker, 85-year-old Scott is no stranger to end times or dystopian futures. In Prometheus (2012), a crew of space explorers come close to unleashing the destruction of humanity, but it was his seminal Blade Runner (1982) that set the standard for a world ruined by human hubris.“I was crucified by the critics on Blade Runner for being so dark,” he says. “I’ve never forgotten that. Pauline Kael: four pages of destruction! I framed it in the office. And what that taught me was: don’t read your own press, good or bad. Because if it’s great press, you think you own the world – and you don’t. If it’s bad press, you think … hmm. So I never read the critics. I just do what I have to do.”What he knows he has to do, he says, is find points of sympathy and humanity within his grim themes. “Unless you’re doing Macbeth, you have to always try and find an element of humour, providing it isn’t humour for humour’s sake,” he says. “I try and hide what I think underneath.”He encouraged Elordi and Brolin to see themselves as a post-pandemic version of The Odd Couple. “I’ll make that reference clear: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Walter Matthau: ‘If you clean that ashtray one more time, I’ll brain you with it’. So that’s The Odd Couple. I thought they were pretty funny, actually.”But nothing lifts the mood on screen – or among an audience – so fast as a smiling, tail-wagging dog.“I’m a dog man,” says Scott. “I’ve always had dogs. They carry their hearts on their shoulders and in their eyes and, in many respects, are nicer than people!”And easier to direct? He snorts.“No, impossible! Mine don’t behave at all. You say ‘come here’ and they’ll go galloping off in the opposite direction.”Then he cocks a thumb at Elordi. “He’s good with dogs. I call him a bit of a farm boy, because he got on a big grass cutter and just drove it, then said ‘Hup!’ and the dog got up there with him.”Stephanie Bunbury is a film and culture writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners