Jacob Elordi Is No Austin Butler When It Comes To Playing Elvis in ‘Priscilla’: “If You Want An Elvis Impersonator, Go to Vegas”

Move over, Austin Butler, there’s a new Elvis in town! Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny portray famed rock n’ roll couple Priscilla and Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s upcoming biographical drama Priscilla, in which the Elvis actor was adamant to not sound like a “caricature” of the “Hound Dog” singer.

During a press conference at the 61st New York Film Festival on Friday, October 6, 2023, Elordi opened up about portraying the music icon, and addressed how he aced Elvis’s signature baritone. 

While talking about playing the real-life musician, Elordi said, “The abundance of information gives you this universe of information to draw from.”

He continued, “If you want to see an Elvis impersonator, you can go to Vegas. I think it was about catching the essence of this person, and trying to identify and find where the human being was under all the glitz, the gold, the voice, the caricatures, and all these things.”

Butler, who played Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 Academy Award-nominated movie, took a different approach to his portrayal and was subsequently roasted online for refusing to drop his ’50s accent for over three years after filming. 

Elordi continued to say that he and his costar, Spaeny, tried to “imagine” the movie as a marriage drama that’s “completely separate from Elvis and Priscilla” in order to channel the authenticity of the story being told.  “That’s what the world is catered towards – finding a truth that hadn’t been seen before, opening the door to Graceland, and inventing what we thought the real people might have spoken like.”

Returning to the accent, Elordi said, “I have a different voice now, when I speak in front of people, it’s not how I speak when I’m him… I was just trying to figure out how to make it the normal person he was,” the actor added in regards to his performance.

Based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, Priscilla follows the tumultuous relationship between Priscilla – who was a freshman in high school when she began being courted by Elvis – and the famed singer. On press notes provided by A24, Coppola spoke about her attraction to the source material “I found it to be a kind of Alice in Wonderland, a girl’s journey into an unimaginable fantasy and how she comes out the other end seeing things more clearly. There was something so fascinating, and so touching, to me about her story. What would it be like to go into Graceland as a child and leave as an adult? I started to think about how you might illustrate that as an impressionistic memory.”

Priscilla releases in theaters on November 3, 2023. The movie screens at the New York Film Festival on Friday, October 6 at 6 pm, 6:15 pm, 6:30 pm, 6:45 pm, 9 pm, 9:15 pm, 9:30 pm, 9:45 pm; Sunday, October 8 at 6 pm; Sunday, October 15 at 12 pm.