It’s a particular affliction for actors who’ve grown up in the age of streaming: getting great, juicy parts that people mainly watch while they’re doing their laundry. And for Elordi — a 26 year-old native of Brisbane, Australia, who will often go by himself to his local Los Feliz theater for a double feature and who’s spent a lifetime steeping himself in his acting idols, like Marlon Brando, Lawrence Olivier, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Daniel Day-Lewis — this final berth into theaters feels particularly triumphant.
“It’s a whole different world. I love it,” he says, joining Spaeny, 25, for a joint Zoom with The Washington Post, dialing in from a beige room in Los Angeles while wearing a leather jacket and a “James Dean Death Cult” hat adorned with a metal pin of Coppola’s face. “I am so deeply grateful to be going to film festivals that honor cinema and then to be able to sit in these rooms with people and watch the movie on the big screen,” he goes on. “I feel like I’ve been given a golden ticket.”
Under normal Hollywood circumstances, this would be Elordi’s breakout year on the road to becoming a movie star. (GQ already declared him “Gen Z’s leading man” and will honor him as one of their 2023 Men of the Year.) He actually has an even bigger part in another movie that’s making the rounds of film festivals, “Saltburn,” a kinky satire of the British class system from “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell and co-starring Barry Keoghan; he plays Felix, an irresistibly charming, somewhat callous son of aristocrats who “adopts” a scholarship kid every year at Oxford to bring home to his family’s country estate.
On Zoom, Elordi and Spaeny have an easy rapport, and he often cedes the floor to her, which mirrors the tone of the movie, releasing nationwide Nov. 3. Based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, “Elvis and Me,” Coppola’s film is firmly rooted in the perspective of the title character. The film’s central question focuses on her: What would it be like to be chosen by the most famous man in the world, to be scooped up and transplanted into his adults’ playhouse of Graceland, to be his companion through flashbulbs and screaming throngs, to constantly be in his shadow and under his control — all starting when you were just 14 and he was 24? Spaeny appears in nearly every frame of the film, often alone, neglected and abandoned in her opulent prison as Elordi’s Elvis is (rather boldly) relegated to a side character who’s always off on tour, or shooting a movie, or protesting over the phone that the tabloid reports of his affair with co-star Ann-Margret are all made up.
When he does appear, though, Elordi’s Elvis is a far darker version than the one Austin Butler played in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” just a year and a half ago. He controls Priscilla’s hair color, cakes makeup onto her eyes, refuses to have sex with her, tells her she can’t have a job because he needs her by the phone and snaps into rages where he throws large objects at her head. Despite some similarities to the bad-boy behavior of his “Euphoria” character, Elordi says his performance is all coming from his research and Priscilla’s account. “You look at what he was struggling with at that time and you kind of can do the emotional math and figure out the way that might make someone feel like they’re in a pressure cooker,” he says.
“It’s a really complicated, strange story that happened. And we get to put it on screen,” Spaeny says. “And I think that it has a lot of universal elements in it that a lot of young women can relate to.”
It also makes complete sense why he was drawn to her, Elordi says. Elvis was overseas in Germany, stationed as a U.S. soldier from 1958 to 1960. He’d come there the same year his beloved mother, Gladys, had died. A family friend of Priscilla’s brought her to one of Elvis’s parties; she was a military kid from the States. That she was 14 and he was 24 is a tricky and upsetting detail in the telling of their love story, even if Priscilla insists they didn’t have sex until their wedding night, when she was 21 and he was 32. But he did feel drawn to her like a magnet.
“I think he deeply missed his mother and he deeply missed home,” says Elordi. “And from what you can read and my interpretation, she was home to him. She was a place that he could go and grieve and hurt and be a human being who suffers and feels and plays and loves.”
Comparisons to Luhrmann’s film are inevitable, but they really have very little to do with each other. One is full of bombast and centered on Elvis; the other is quiet and introspective, focused on a young woman in his thrall, but often left behind. It’s just coincidence that Coppola was starting to shoot her Elvis story just as Luhrmann’s was hitting theaters. Elordi says he made a conscious choice not to watch it at the time. “For me it was very head-in-the-sand, like it is with most things where you don’t want to be influenced. You know, when we’re shooting a film that spans through the ’60s, I’m not going to be listening to rap music and other things that are going to clash with the world.”
Spaeny still hasn’t seen it. “It didn’t feel like the material that was right in terms of researching the role, especially when I have the woman herself [Priscilla] to talk to, and the book,” she says. “And then we shot it and now we’re promoting it, and if I’m going to be honest, I’m just slightly Elvis-ed out at the moment.”
Each of them have a similar story about how they got cast in the film: Coppola simply asked them out for a meal. When looking for someone to play Priscilla, Coppola asked for casting advice from Kirsten Dunst, who’d starred in Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” when she was 23. Dunst had just worked with Spaeny on Alex Garland’s upcoming “Civil War” and recommended her to Coppola. “Kirsten is like a sister to me, and when she recommended Cailee, I paid attention,” Coppola told W Magazine. After a long lunch, Spaeny had the part.
The young actress had been a fan of Coppola’s ever since watching the director’s feature debut, “The Virgin Suicides,” as a teenager in Missouri — and it also turned out her father was an Elvis fan and had taken her to Graceland. “I found her films when I was 14 years old and they really sort of opened things up for me personally, seeing the way that she looked at young women and didn’t underestimate them, and really gave them the space to have a dark side and longings, wants and needs,” she says. “I felt that side of myself that I was too shy to show. I got to express that more through watching her films and it was the first time I ever thought about who’s behind the camera.”
Elordi got his part after a long breakfast. “I mean, I would hold the boom in a Sofia Coppola movie. She’s in my church of cinema,” he says. And he didn’t feel at all intimidated to play such an icon of rock-n-roll, so soon after Butler did. “Me and Cailee spoke about this. There’s no choice,” he says. “There is no world in which any sane actor-slash-human-being says no to Sofia Coppola. And I can tell you now from this experience, you would be a genuine madman to turn away from that situation. It was probably one of the greatest things that’s ever happened in my life.”
He’d been working on “Saltburn,” which has interesting parallels to Elvis. His character, Felix, is a kind of golden boy, worshiped by everyone around him, but perhaps not as wonderful as he seems from the outside. “He was exactly what I wanted Felix to be, which is a bit of a dumb-dumb. You know, like the kind of person who you would absolutely lose your mind over, but if you had him over to your house, you’d just be like, ‘eh,’” Fennell said at a Q&A at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia.
It just so happened that he was filming in London, where Spaeny was also doing a project, so the two began spending time together, just hanging out, talking about Priscilla’s book or going for horseback rides. Elordi worked for months to nail Elvis’s Memphis accent (unlike Butler, he didn’t talk in it for months afterward). And they bonded over just loving movies. “I remember just thinking, Thank God this guy takes it seriously. I would’ve been so p—ed off,” says Spaeny.
Harder was actually getting the movie shot. Producer Youree Henley says financing was tough to nail down, even with a subject matter that seemed like it would be incredibly interesting to audiences. “We were just like, ‘Wait, there’s literally an Elvis movie out right now that probably had 10 times [our budget] and it’s doing very well,” says Henley. “And it’s not like Sofia has never made a movie before.”
But they didn’t want to work with a studio, and even Elordi wasn’t really a name — at least in the Hollywood math used to evaluate how movie stars can increase the value of a film. It’s also a film by a female director, centered on the experiences of a young woman, starring an unknown actress. “You can’t not see that,” says Henley.
The shooting days went from 40 to 30 and nearly to 25, but for a last-minute save. Because of the truncated schedule, says Spaeny, “jumping out an airplane works as an analogy … [There’d be days when] in the morning I’d be pregnant and after lunch I’d be 14 years old.” She won the best actress award at Venice and is being talked about for an Oscar nomination.
As the film has come out into the world, it’s still centered on Priscilla, the real woman, who’s now watching her life’s story play out on screen.
At the news conference and premiere at Venice, both actors have had a front-row seat to watching Priscilla see an interpretation of her life play out on screen. Being asked by this 24-year-old man to go to his room, alone, where she says all they did was kiss. Spending the night and trying to convince her parents that it was platonic. Reaching her dream of being his wife, only to find it wasn’t what she’d dreamed.
“Seeing her relive those moments again was fascinating and really special and informative,” says Spaeny. “But the thing that she felt really important about in telling the story is that there was real love there and she looks back on this time very fondly. She says, you know, that was the love of her life. So I think that was really important to hold on to going into [playing her].”
Elordi, too, used Priscilla and their conversations as his guide. “I think the thing that’s clear to me when she speaks, when she moves, is you can still feel it. You can feel the love she had and has for this man just all the time,” he says. “I think that’s the strongest thing to me. It’s why you want to be sensitive and caring and respectful because at the end of the day, this is a woman who lost the love of her life. Like right now in this time that we’re living in, she’s lost the love of her life.”
