From Toxic King to Hero: Why Jacob Elordi Must Play Clay Hawkins

The sincere depth you brought to a character like Nate Jacobs proves you are the perfect fit to embody the flawed, yet heroic, redemption of Myra’s Ghost’s leading man

Charlotte Joan Cheng

6 min read

·

Just now

--

An Open Letter to Jacob Elordi: From Toxic King to Redemptive Hero

Dear Jacob,

I sincerely hope you are reading this open and public letter. Congratulations on your recent success as The Creature in Guillermo Del Toro’s Netflix Frankenstein film. Although I haven’t watched it yet — as I’m deeply busy drafting my first book, Myra’s Ghost: An American Betrayal — your performance is widely hailed as a humane and successful embodiment of a deeply vulnerable, misunderstood character.

This capacity for sincerity and vulnerability, even within volatile roles, is why I believe you are the only fit for the main hero of my series: Clay Hawkins.

The Anatomy of Clay Hawkins: A Hero Defined by His Demons

Clay Hawkins is the protagonist of my six-volume autofiction political thriller. He is a successful NFL player and Hollywood actor turned documentary director — a troubled man grappling with a pastor’s childhood sexual assault and the loss of his father. This trauma led him to adopt a Toxic Masculinity persona, evidenced by his volatile reputation on the Philadelphia Eagles gridiron and his infamous womanizing past.

Clay’s complicated personal life is central to his arc: he has children with three women — his wife, Kyra Hawkins (née Hale), who is battling cancer; his past flame, Anya Hilliard Kurosaki (Wasian twins, Nathan and Juniper); and the series’ main architect, Charlotte-Joan Cheng (my character, with a Wasian daughter, Riley Caroline Hawkins).

While his actions and documentary methods are volatile, his redemption is driven by the profound love for his children, especially his Wasian daughter, Riley, and his growing emotional bond with Charlotte-Joan. This love compels him to confront the toxic consequences of abused masculinity.

The Fictional Precursor: Nate Jacobs and the Vile Archives

I realized you were the perfect Clay Hawkins when I first drafted the book in August 2025. Clay is emotionally and spiritually connected to the central victim of the Vile Archives, Myra Markle — a White former Disney star murdered in Brentwood in 2015. Clay’s supernatural empathy, and the fact that Myra lived in his neighborhood, ties him to her trauma.

Your signature role, Nate Jacobs in Euphoria, which represented everything wrong about masculinity, is the direct inspiration for Clay Hawkins — a much older, more recognizable, yet similarly volatile version who must now battle that toxic moniker for years of atonement. Your performance of Nate helped me personally confront the abuse of power I faced from a White superior during my lowest period (2019–2022).

While Nate was an outward bully — terrifying White (Cassie, Jules), Black (Rue), and Latinx (Maddy) peers — Clay Hawkins faces a far more lethal, systematic, and adult evil.

Confronting the Systemic, Lethal Evil

Myra’s Ghost champions Asian feminism by exposing the generational systematic evil rooted in toxic matriarchal and patriarchal cultures. Clay must confront the true villains:

• The Outwardly Aggressive White Men: Figures like Adam Lyon, Lewis Markle, and Daniel Waller whose aggression towards White victims (Myra Markle, Penelope Carpenter) is shown as real-life, generational violence.
• The Insidious Asian Villains: The most lethal figures, like Ethan Yamamoto (fellow NFL player) and Nicholas Tan (respected church elder who murdered Joanne Tee). They maintain a squeaky-clean, Asian Trailblazing facade while committing far worse, systematic crimes: murder, cover-ups, and the transmission of AIDS/STDs to multiple Asian women like Anna Yagami and Amanda Tan.

Ethan Yamamoto is my response to Nate Jacobs’s outward aggression — the horror of someone given power in the Asian community, violating women in a culture where victims are forced into silence by familial and community pressure.

This systematic evil is upheld by toxic matriarchs — both fictional, like Grace Yamamoto (inspired by my mother, Caroline Chong) and real-life figures like my manipulative cousin, Sharon Chong. These figures are often more lethally dangerous than Nate’s mother, Marsha Jacobs (whom I’ve proposed Paula Marshall play as a stable, positive counterpart).

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The Privilege to be Heard

The central heartbreak of the Myra’s Ghost universe is that while White victims (like Rue or Cassie) can often speak out against villains like Nate, real-life Asian women (like me, and the fictional Ai Shinsuka and Anna Yagami) are silenced by community pressure to never condemn their own people.

To break this silence, the story needs a heroic White counterpart — a figure of strong White masculinity like Clay Hawkins — to utilize his privilege. Clay must confront his own demons (including his suppressed Basque and Spanish heritage) and the system, so that his Wasian daughter, Riley, and the primary Architect, my character Charlotte-Joan, can finally have their voices heard.

Your ability to embody deep vulnerability, compassion, and integrity, seen in roles from Nate Jacobs to The Creature, makes you spiritually and inherently fit to portray Clay Hawkins. Playing him would allow you to fully embody the moral determination needed to fight the Vile Archives and advocate for those who cannot speak.

I hope you read this, Jacob. Taking the role of Clay Hawkins would be a profound step toward having a greater purpose in acting and advocating for silent voices. It would be one of the most important performances in your professional and personal life, and hopefully as will- it would be something that you would declare as something profoundingly signficant to your future wife or your children, when they would finally watch their husband or their father in the screens as a redeeming figure and a hero.

Thank you for reading this open letter. I hope we can work together and cross paths soon.

Your peer and hopeful collaborator,

Charlotte-Joan Cheng

(CEO/Founder of St Epiphanie Destine Enterprise and Writer of Myra’s Ghost)

The deepest intellectual flaw in our society is the collective insistence on the Saccharine Lie—the beautiful lie of perfection, maintained at the cost of human life. I know this cost intimately. For ten years, I navigated a procedural system that valued a forgotten leave certificate over my basic health and sanity. I witnessed firsthand how the fear of being "found fault with" and the anxiety of "losing a job" (fears I inherited from my own mother) forces good people into silence. I now leave that rigid environment not in failure, but in righteous anger, because the survival of our children depends on dismantling the structural rot I was forced to observe.
The book I have written, Myra’s Ghost, is not a novel of entertainment; it is a meticulously researched manifesto detailing the mechanisms of this systemic failure. The coming chapters reveal not only the truth behind the heartbreaking murders of Myra Markle and the abuse of countless others but expose the very institutional silence that allowed the Vile Archives to thrive. We are facing a cultural inflection point—a purge is upon us—and this book is the blueprint for the necessary confrontation.
The author, Charlotte-Joan Cheng, is a neurodivergent writer and structural theorist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My work is dedicated to examining the flaws of institutional frameworks and the psychology of trauma. My personal journey includes fighting institutional rigidity within the education sector for over a decade, a path that ultimately provided the framework for the structural analysis found within this text. My current focus, as seen in this article and others, is to provide the intellectual honesty and Volatile Truth required to combat the global Saccharine Lie. The fight begins now.