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MOVIE FEATURE

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”Cailee is so expressive with her face, and she has an incredible ability to move between different stages of life. We shot the film out of order, but somehow she could be a 15-year-old in Germany in the morning, and in the afternoon be pregnant in her 20s at Graceland. And both felt equally true,” says the director. Based on Presley’s 1985 best-selling memoir, Elvis and Me , the film sees Spaeny deftly take Priscilla from wide-eyed schoolgirl crush through to numbing disappointment,

motherhood, and divorce. ”The first step was reading Priscilla’s book, and then reading the script, and writing out the biggest questions that I had,” Spaeny, 25, tells STACK . ”Then [it was] meeting with Priscilla and trying to go through that chapter of her life. ”I always wanted her to feel comfortable,” she continues. ”I never wanted to feel like I was interviewing her. I wanted it to come up naturally, but she would go into these sort of specific memories that she had with him. It was really special, the detail that she would talk about, but also just taking in the presence of this woman who’s lived this life. ”It was like her eyes would sparkle again talking about certain moments, or she’d laugh at an inside joke. It was these nuggets of gold that helped me put this massive puzzle together, especially in the way that Sofia tells it - in this sort of impressionistic, memory type way. ”[Presley is] such a fascinating woman, and very graceful in the way that she holds herself, and very soft spoken. But she also has this fierceness about her, and she’s very protective.” Spaeny attests she was thrilled when she learned that Elordi had been cast as Elvis. ”I was a fan of his work,” the actress explains, ”so I was interested in what he was going to bring to the table. I messaged him right away when I found out he had the role.” Spaeny and Elordi met several times before they began shooting. ”I just wanted to get a sense of who he was and for us to feel comfortable around each other,” Spaeny says of the meetings. ”I knew once we started filming it would be crazy, shooting this in 30 days. But he had my back throughout the whole process, and he’s so naturally charismatic and wears his heart on his sleeve, so it was nice for those parts of him to come through.”

Baz Luhrmann gave us the pulsating and sexy Elvis last year, and now Sofia Coppola uses a more muted lens to tell the story through the eyes of Elvis’s teenage bride, Priscilla. Words Gill Pringle

S tarring Australia’s Jacob Elordi as The King, he delivers a dazzling performance - though this film isn’t all about him.

this vision, Coppola looked for an actress able to embody both Priscilla’s youthful naivete, and her inner growth in the hothouse of Graceland - which she found in rising star Cailee Spaeny. ”Talking to Priscilla, I always found something very sweet and soft and open about her,” recalls Coppola, whose selection of Spaeny met with approval from the film’s co-producer, Priscilla Presley herself, now 78 years old. ”And when I saw Cailee, I saw those same qualities.

With our 14-year-old ’heroine’ having a girlhood crush on Elvis (who is ten years her senior), it’s hard not to immediately feel uncomfortable watching the genesis of this relationship. If Priscilla’s own parents only briefly raise an eyebrow, then it’s the audience who, in a sense, become surrogate parents, helplessly watching Priscilla’s romantic fantasy unfold with a moody and controlling Elvis. While Priscilla was ill-equipped to handle her lover’s volatility, Coppola reminds us that Priscilla

Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny

• Priscilla is out on Mar 27

was attending a Catholic girl’s school by day, while sharing Graceland with her king by night. And even after they marry, Priscilla is little more than a lonely bedroom fixture while Elvis enjoys flings with his Hollywood co-stars. The entire movie is channelled through Priscilla’s point of view, and to accomplish

The Beekeeper is available on Blu-ray and DVD on March 27. Look out for our interview with the director and cast online.

16 MARCH 2024

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