The following article contains spoilers for Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, which premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival.
Biopics that find themselves in and around the Elvis Presley story are a bit like buses, they say: you wait years for another to arrive and then two come in the space of eighteen months. Priscilla, however, isn't an Elvis movie in the same way that Baz Luhrmann's Elvis — which premiered at Cannes last year and went on to shake its hips to box office returns fit for a (well, the) King — was, as you might well glean from the title.
Adapted from the real-life Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoir Elvis and Me with her consultation (indeed, Presley attended the press conference for Priscilla at the Venice Film Festival yesterday), director Sofia Coppola's main interest is the rock n' roll legend's titular beleaguered wife, portrayed by Cailee Spaeny. As the movie chronicles their long relationship, she struggles to carve out a sliver of autonomy from Elvis, depicted as a capricious man-child who demands she drop everything to be at his beck and call. Handsome light, inevitably, is cast on the taboo in the room: Priscilla was 14 when she met a 24-year-old Elvis. Even in the 1960s, their age difference was more than a little icky, though they're not shown to have sex until Priscilla is a legal adult.
Nevertheless, you'd be forgiven for still having Elvis' Oscar-nominated, chronically-accent-afflicted Austin Butler on the mind when you come to Priscilla, where Elvis is portrayed by Euphoria's Jacob Elordi, a curious casting in a vacuum but especially so when you consider what they might look like placed back-to-back, or next to each other in a police line-up.
So how does Elordi compare? For one, he's somewhere approaching sixteen feet tall, whereas Butler is more of a height normie. When we meet the Elordi Elvis, he's sat in his ornate, dimly-lit home in West Germany, where Elvis lived during his army deployment in the late ‘50s. (It visually evokes the devilish brothel from that episode of The Simpsons. Priscilla is whisked to it by a friend of Elvis who seems to serve as his pimp. Overall, the sense is that he’s more than a few gal pals.) His legs seem never to end. Your first thought, then: “God, this guy is massive.” Then he stands next to Spaeny, a diminutive five-footer, and it's like a giraffe towering over a gazelle.
It's appropriate of a film about an overbearing man parasitically draining his wife's freedom and fun that he should literally make her seem — and feel — small. But then there are the other physical elements, some leaning into (very good) impression territory, which undergird Elordi's interpretation with a little familiarity. He has that cooler-than-cool head co*ck, which more than once Coppola captures in hot silhouette; he ambles pelvis-forwardly in a way that screams charismatic confidence. In some ways, it's the Elvis we've all seen in recorded stage footage, or indeed, incanted by Austin Butler in Elvis. The primary difference here is that we see Elordi's Elvis, for the most part, behind the grand ornate doors of Graceland, so it's a step away from his performed public persona. In private, he's actually quite pathetic and babyish — owing to the co*cktails of sleeping tablets he wolfs down, this Elvis spends most days in bed until 4 p.m., watching then-contemporary movies; that bedroom definitely stinks — which offers an important window of sympathy into an otherwise grim figure.
But here's the bit you've been waiting for, bab-eh. What's the accent like? It was emulated so zealously by Butler that his version of that singular Southern drawl stuck around until the Oscars, and Elordi nails it too. It's all grits and gravy, mash and cornbread. Equally, it's a step before the “huh-huh-huh” you'd expect to find on the Vegas strip, which Butler sometimes joyously leaned into, as was appropriate for a baroque, maximalist bio-epic where the performances were as big as Luhrmann's sets. Elordi is quieter, subtler, as is Priscilla, but you never think he's not the King.
This is all to say that Elordi's version of Elvis is distinct from Butler's turn — iconoclastic and less reverential, but it could be similarly awardsy. That's a product, centrally, of a script that views him from Priscilla's hard-pressed perspective, but it's still to Elordi's credit that he brings something fresh to an overwhelmingly mythologised character who was the central subject of a fawning biopic mere months ago.
Priscilla comes to UK cinemas on 26 December.
