When Cailee Spaeny was 13 she reached a crossroads: she could carry on the way she was going or walk away from a normal life forever. Quitting high school to become an actor might not work out, she knew that, but Spaeny took the hard road; the exciting and risky one. And such was the choice the teenage Priscilla Presley made in 1963, leaving her family stationed in Germany to move in with Elvis at his home. Graceland, under the protective care of the singer’s father, Vernon. So, when Spaeny was cast in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, perhaps the two women, actor and subject, had more in common than they knew.
Related Stories
“We were the same age when we had this conviction, ‘Well, this is my life and I want this and I’m a teenager, but…,’ Spaeny says. “Like Priscilla’s family, my family made incredible sacrifices to support that decision. And you’re not only having to get it right for yourself, but also make sure that you don’t let them down.”
At their first meeting, in a Los Angeles restaurant, Presley told Spaeny, “I would’ve found a way to get to Graceland to be with Elvis, whether they helped me or not.” Says Spaeny, “I probably would’ve done the same thing if my parents didn’t help me get to LA. I would’ve found some person and I would’ve jumped in their car, and I would’ve made it work. I was hell-bent on that decision. I grew up really quickly and I started bringing income to my family when I was a very young age. It wasn’t a sort of cute, ‘I’ll try this out.’ It was like, ‘I have to make this work.’”
In casting Priscilla, Coppola had been searching for someone who could play 14 to late twenties, and Spaeny was vouched for by Coppola’s muse of sorts, Kirsten Dunst, who had worked with the young actor on Alex’s Garland’s upcoming Civil War — Spaeny’s second go-round with Garland after starring in his Hulu series Devs.
“I guess she just saw something in me and Jacob and she pulled the trigger,” Spaeny says. There was no chemistry read with Jacob Elordi, who would play Elvis. “The thing about Sofia is that when she knows what she wants, she really goes for it and trusts her gut.”
Spaeny emailed Elordi and together they connected over their love of cinema. “The first night we met, we went and saw Gilda, the Rita Hayworth film, which ended up being one of the Sofia’s references. Then we just hung out. We were in London at the same time, and we just became really close. Very quickly, I learned that he approaches roles in the same way that I do. Basically, we’re just two nerds. We’re really intense about these things. We barely ever hung out when we were filming because we were just so in it.”
Then there were the meetings with Presley herself. “She’s a woman of a different generation,” Spaeny says. “She holds herself so differently. She still dresses in a way that she really is so elegant, and my go-to is jeans and a T-shirt and my vocal register sits down here. I’m a girl of a different age. She is royalty. She holds herself in that.”
Presley was soft-spoken and a little shy, Spaeny says. But she was also fiercely protective of her family and her story. “If there was something I was getting wrong about the way I perceived it, she would go, ‘What do you mean by that? No, that’s not right, that’s not it.’ But she’d do it in a kind way.”
Sometimes the two women would just talk about dogs. “I mean, we ended up talking for four hours, and then we got into talking about her time with Elvis, and there’d just be these amazing details to the story that, coming from the woman herself, they were like gold. It was so special, and her eyes would light up like she was back there with him and she would laugh at a joke that he told. It was really these precious moments that I’ll always take with me.”
Spaeny understood the delicacy of the material and its deeply personal telling in Presley’s book Elvis and Me. And she connected to Presley’s experience of first love, she says. “I think the baseline emotional journey that she went through, it’s probably times 10 anything that I’ve gone through, because it was out there for the world to see, but [it’s about] just falling in love for the first time and doing anything to hold onto that feeling. When you’re so young, when you fall in love like that, you don’t know who you are to begin with. So, when [your partner] says, ‘I like women like this,’ or, ‘I prefer that,’ I know in my own experience, I’ve definitely gone, ‘Well, I don’t know who I am anyway, so I might as well be that, because I’m in love.’ You want to hold on.”
Apart from reading everything she could, Spaeny studied every photo she could find, and watched every film. “I watched her interviews after she had released the book. I even watched her Naked Gun movies, which I laughed about with her.” Starring Leslie Nielsen, the Naked Gun movies revealed that Priscilla had great comic timing and a surprisingly risqué sense of humor to boot. “I was like, ‘I can’t pin you down! You’re so interesting.’ And she thought that was funny.”
Spaeny and Elordi also studied the home movies that the Presleys made. “They were really great for Jacob and I. Her on the tour bus or her on a beach vacation with him, and they really just looked like two kids in love. All the glitz and glam was gone, and they were just rolling around in the sand, or she’s there hanging around the guys and the boys are playing tag with each other right next to the tour bus. Those were really special. Or there’s an amazing one of her where Elvis threw a surprise 21st birthday for her, which is so sweet.”
There was one piece of research that became her go-to reference. “I memorized it like a monologue and would say it over and over again. It was the only audio that I had of her that was closest to the time I was playing her, so I would just listen to it because she sits in a different vocal register than I do. She’s much higher, much breathier, and so I would play that over and over in my head just to have it in there as an entryway before a scene.”
Presley’s story raises some uncomfortable truths: Her astounding youth when she and Elvis met — she was 14, he 24; a horrifying scene in a Vegas motel when Elvis aggressively pins Priscilla to the bed; a scene in the studio where he angrily throws something near her head, and more generally, his infidelity and oppressive expectations of his wife. So how did Spaeny come to see these issues?
“There are definitely some shocking details in there… I mean, if you just had to do a one-minute breakdown of the most shocking moments in their relationship, it’s going to sound like one thing, but then she’s so candid in the way that she tells the story, and it’s complicated, and it does sit in a gray area, but I think if you were actually there and you were in her shoes, every choice she made along the way is completely understandable.
“It’s a very tricky story we’re telling, and I think we did our best to try to make it human and just take the facts and put them on screen. I’m really proud of the way that Sofia and all of us tried to handle it with grace and care and thoughtfulness.”
At the film’s Venice premiere, Elordi sat sandwiched between Presley and a very anxious Spaeny, who felt she might faint from fear. She tried to tell herself that whatever Presley thought of her performance, she would survive it. But then, as the lights came up, Presley turned to her. “That was a great performance,” she said. “I watched my life through you.”
