Priscilla takes Cailee Spaeny from school dropout to Oscars hopeful

When Cailee Spaeny was just 13, she persuaded her parents that her only way forward was to leave school, head to Hollywood and become a proper actor, a future that their corner of southern Missouri simply couldn’t provide.

“I was a bit of an odd kid,” she says. “I was terrible in school, so I kind of dropped out and then went right into the arts and put everything into it, as much as I could. And then I kind of hit my max when I ran out of things to do. I’d worked in a theme park, I’m pretending to write music, I’m doing infomercials, I’m doing theatre.

“And then it was like I met a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who had a roommate in LA who was a manager and that was enough for me. I convinced my parents and we packed the car and drove to California.”

Their troubled child was on the brink of becoming the family breadwinner. It is a strange coincidental parallel at the heart of Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s wistful, melancholy and cumulatively shocking film about Priscilla Presley’s life with Elvis: both Spaeny and Presley started their adult lives when they were just kids.

Priscilla Beaulieu was a 14-year-old innocent recently moved with her parents to a US army base in Germany when the base entertainment officer invited her to a party at new conscript Elvis Presley’s digs. Elvis was 24. So taken was he with this plump-cheeked girl that he contrived to have her move in with him when he returned to Memphis.

At 17, Priscilla was ensconced in her gilded cage. By day, she negotiated the new school he paid for. By night, she stayed up with him, popping pills to stay awake and watching movies. Sex was to be saved for marriage. When he was on tour – where there was a strict no-wives rule – or making movies, she waited by the phone while reading tabloid stories about his on-set romances.

The Beaulieus were strict and conventional, even by the standards of 1962, but they were sufficiently charmed by Presley’s fame and Southern manners to entrust him with their child. It seems astonishing now, but both Coppola and Spaeny – and Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis with uncanny verisimilitude – approach this disquieting story in a matter-of fact way. This happened, then this. Elvis dresses Priscilla, dictates her hair colour, marries her, throws a chair at her head, becomes increasingly erratic. A gaggle of his buddies, the Memphis mob, are always around. Eventually, realising she is 28 and has no idea who she is, his “little one” leaves.

Priscilla and Elvis Presley on their wedding day, and right, Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny in the film. 

Priscilla Presley wrote her story in Elvis and Me, published in 1985. Coppola has a gimlet eye for telling detail, but some of the most breathtaking – such as Elvis’ gift of guns to match his wife’s dresses – make her book even more disturbing than the film. At the same time, she has actively preserved and furthered the Elvis legend; after his death, she became one of the executors of the Graceland estate and was central to its financial success.

Spaeny says Presley speaks of her former husband with visible affection, still laughing at their shared jokes or remembering something he once said. It is a balancing act, as is her simultaneous show of tell-all frankness in the book and public role as the dowager Queen to Elvis’ King. Spaeny describes her as American royalty. At 78, it is a role she has never shown any signs of abdicating.

Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla: “I think about Priscilla Presley who is around and who wants her story to be told in the right way.”Credit: Nixco

What interested Sofia Coppola was the fact that the story of their marriage, despite Elvis Presley’s fame and status as part of America’s cultural pantheon, was so little known. “I just thought it was so interesting that they’re such a mythic couple and yet we don’t really know that much about her,” she says.

Coppola has two teenage daughters of her own. “I was putting myself in her shoes as a teenager having a crush on a much older rock star,” she says. “I can imagine what that was like – I think everyone can.

“But then also, as a mother, I could relate to the parents. What would you do in that situation? I really tried not to be judgmental to anyone.” She will not be drawn on the subject of their age difference, which now seems grotesque. Yes, she was initially shocked. “But there were so many elements of it. And no matter what age they were, he was dominant. I think people can get into relationships where one person is dominant.

Priscilla director Sofia Coppola: “I just thought it was so interesting that they’re such a mythic couple and yet we don’t really know that much about her.″⁣Credit: Melodie McDaniel

“She told me that when she left, in the ’70s, she had to find her own taste, she didn’t know what her taste was because it was always his. Certainly it’s hard enough to grow up at all, let alone with somebody who is such a force. She definitely struggled with that.”

As a Southern girl, Spaeny had grown up with the Elvis legend. “My mom was a massive fan of Elvis,” she says. “She knew the memoir like the back of her hand. I had no idea, but she could name all the Memphis mob. OK Mom! But I remember visiting Graceland as a kid, that was somewhere we went on vacation and I have a vivid memory of my dad walking around Graceland crying as If I Can Dream was playing and I remember taking in how much he meant to my family and culture, in America but specifically the South.”

Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla. Presley told director Sofia Coppola that “when she left, in the ’70s, she had to find her own taste … because it was always his.”Credit: Nixco

It was the prospect of working with Coppola, however, that both drew her to the project and calmed her nervousness about portraying this famous woman. From her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999), through to Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Bling Ring (2013), Coppola has repeatedly returned to stories of young women trying to find their identities while fighting through the thickets of difficult circumstances.

“When I was 14 I discovered The Virgin Suicides and it sort of rocked me,” Spaeny says. “I thought ‘oh, someone understands my sadness as a 14-year-old’. That was the first time I had thought about who was behind the camera. And that was my first entry into the idea of filmmaking, not just movies for entertainment.”

Spaeny is 24 but can look much younger, which was essential for Priscilla; Coppola didn’t want to change actors midstream. She had played supporting – and often junior – roles in such films as Vice and Bad Times at the El Royale and featured in television series such as Mare of Easttown and Devs, but was still largely unknown.

Kirsten Dunst contacted Coppola, her long-term friend and collaborator, after working with Spaeny on Alex Garland’s forthcoming film Civil War. “She said she’s really talented,” says Coppola. “And I trust Kirsten and her intelligence. I was really happy that the producers let me cast an unknown actress. I love to see movies where we get to discover someone. And especially because the characters are so famous, I think to have actors we don’t know a lot about does help.”

Cailee Spaeney describes her subject as American royalty.Credit: Nixco

Spaeny was on the Civil War set with Dunst the day she was given the Priscilla role and ran to tell her. “She just started crying and gave me a huge hug,” she recalls. “I think Kirsten was 23 when she played Marie Antoinette and I was 24 when I got the role.” It felt like a passing of the baton.

The most difficult thing, she says, was portraying a real person. “It’s all so terrifying and so foreign for me. I haven’t done anything like this. A leading role for one thing – and in a Sofia Coppola film – and then I think about Priscilla Presley who is around and who wants her story to be told in the right way. It’s a lot.”

Presley was closely involved with the project as a producer, but saw the completed film for the first time at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where Spaeny went on to win the Volpi Cup for best actress. She sat one seat away, with Elordi between them.

“I thought I was going to pass out and I tried to leave the theatre about three times when I was watching myself on screen,” Spaeny says. “Jacob was just like ‘it’s good, it’s good, just stay and watch it’.” She did. Afterwards, Presley told her she had just watched her own life, exactly as it was. “Which is all I could ever want.”

The film’s frankness did ruffle feathers, despite Priscilla’s standing as the chief keeper of the Presley flame. Her daughter, Lisa Marie, who died in January last year, was Elvis’ sole heir. Before the film screened for the first time, it emerged that she had read the script and objected strongly to the way it depicted her father. In 2022, she wrote to Coppola, saying “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative. As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character … I am worried that my mother isn’t seeing the nuance here or realising the way in which Elvis will be perceived when this movie comes out.” Coppola ploughed on. She is, as Spaeny observes, an iron fist in a silk glove.

The Presley estate had already refused permission to use any of Elvis’ music, Coppola confirms; instead, she wove together a powerful soundtrack using music of the time and anachronistic choices reflecting the film’s passing moods and themes.

Cailee Spaeny at this week’s Golden Globe awards, where she was nominated for her role in Priscilla.Credit: AP

“I thought ‘well, we’re telling Priscilla’s story, so it’s interesting to do a movie about Elvis without any Elvis’. They are very protective. I think they were very involved with Baz Luhrmann’s film and don’t like things being made without their involvement.”

The culminating song was Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, which Elvis sang to Priscilla when they divorced. “I thought it was important to have a woman’s voice at the end, as she’s coming into her own.”

There were already tensions between the women Presley left behind, as became clear after Lisa Marie’s death, but the legend of the love story is set in stone. That story is here, along with the chair-throwing. Coppola referred to goofy home videos of the young Elvis and very young Priscilla frolicking on the beach for her own moments of light-hearted romance.

At their first meeting, Presley told Spaeny: “I would’ve found a way to get to Graceland to be with Elvis, whether my parents helped me or not.” Spaeny said she would have done the same if her parents hadn’t helped her get to Los Angeles. “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.” But just as Priscilla chafed under her partner’s control, Spaeny feels an ambivalence – or perhaps it is simply fear – about acting.

“It’s a love-hate relationship,” she says. “When I’m acting, it’s quite stressful. And when I’m watching myself, it’s also quite stressful. So I keep asking myself: what do I like about this? But I think the biggest thing for me is collaborating with people. Sets are such interesting places. It’s all misfits and weirdos. Everyone who ended up in these jobs: we’re all a little bit funny and lonely and we’re all here because we love art.”

Where does she go from here? She says she wants to work with Claire Denis, with Robert Eggers, with Luca Guadagnino: roughly, a checklist of arthouse’s biggest names. Having won best actress in Venice, a Golden Globe nomination and a likely Oscar nod, the young hopeful from Southern Missouri is suddenly in a different league. Viva Cailee Spaeny.

Priscilla opens in cinemas on January 18. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards will be announced on January 23.