Cailee Spaeny is Sofia Coppola’s new muse
The actor’s strong, quiet stint in Hollywood is paying off: she’s winning awards for her role as the titular character in the director’s ‘Priscilla’.

Cailee Spaeny hasn’t seen a list of past winners of the Volpi Cup, the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Best Actress prize that she won for her portrayal of Priscilla Presley. She laughs when I ask if she wants to know the names of the others (among them: Sophia Loren, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Emma Stone). “If you want to tell me,” she says politely, pouring me a glass of water. “I’ve heard some [of them]. I try not to look at those things… Good attention can be just as damaging as bad attention.”

It’s a perspective that’s very telling of Cailee Spaeny, the actor. She has been working for well over a decade now, with roles small and large in films such as On the Basis of Sex, Vice and Pacific Rim Uprising – films which had louder selling points (Ruth Bader Ginsberg; director Adam McKay; John Boyega) that overshadowed her integral involvement. But with her lead role in Sofia Coppola’s pristine and lovelorn Priscilla, the 25-year-old Missouri native is navigating an entirely new level of stardom and an industry that is raring to take and take from stars like her – the Faustian pact of it all. But she is determined, with a fierceness that belies her gentle demeanour, to keep her feet planted firmly on the ground.

That isn’t to say that Cailee isn’t delighted by her whirlwind adventure as the queen of rock ‘n’ roll – she is, she tells me, “so lucky” to have experienced the film’s reception both at Venice and elsewhere. (After we speak, she’ll earn a Best Actress – Drama nomination at the Golden Globes.) But for Cailee, Priscilla holds an unshakeable place in her heart not for what it has become, but for what it always was: an opportunity to pour herself into a character, to excavate the untold side of a young girl’s story, to work with one of her most admired directors. “It’s literally everything I could have ever wanted wrapped up in one, with a beautiful bow on top,” she says, breaking momentarily into a breathless gush. “Sofia is my dream director. Her films changed me when I was 14 years old.”

As a director, Sofia – who speaks so universally to women’s most intimate worlds – makes this mark on so many people. “She gave permission for me and for young women to be complex; to have a dark side and needs and yearnings,” Cailee says. “To be sexual or angry…she just sees them how they are. Especially growing up in the Bible Belt of America, there’s definitely a certain way you feel you need to be.” The first of Sofia’s films that entered her world was The Virgin Suicides, a film that grapples with the impossibility of burgeoning sexuality amidst suffocating religious strictures. “When I watched her films, even though it stayed internal and private, I felt that side of myself could be explored,” Cailee says. “I didn’t have to be afraid of [it] anymore.”

Priscilla is, in this regard, an archetypal Sofia Coppola endeavour, ripe with the impossible contradictions of girlhood: the simultaneous accretion and deprivation of agency, the consuming drive and vulnerability of first desire, the elision between one’s private world and the public sphere. It is also the first cinematic portrayal of Elvis Presley (played in the film by Jacob Elordi) and Priscilla’s relationship to pay wary, steady attention to the troubling age gap between the two – they began courting when Priscilla was 14 and Elvis was 27 – laying bare not only its embedded violence, but the complex language of sexual awakening that articulated it. “It is such a grey area,” Cailee says. “It’s shocking and uncomfortable, but at the same time, [Priscilla] is initiating a lot of the sexual moments.” She met the real Priscilla before filming. “The thing [she] said to me is that there was real love there. She would still consider him to be the love of her life. And that’s complicated, but very human. I just wanted to take her truth and put it on screen, and let people decide how they felt after.”

Navigating the complication of the age gap was just one of many conversations that the real-life Priscilla and Cailee had in the months the latter spent researching the role, and Priscilla’s thoughts on the film remain one of the few external markers of success to which Cailee pays attention. Yet there was a tension, Cailee explains, that she felt within her own acting process; in wanting to both remain true to Priscilla’s story while retaining the creative autonomy that comes with creating a role. “I really struggled with it,” she says. “I spent a lot of time talking to her but when I started filming, I stopped having contact. We only had 30 days to shoot, and I think if I was going into each scene thinking, ‘Oh, she was having this thought’, it would have [become] too controlled. Sometimes Jacob and I would feel lost, and we’d have to remind ourselves that we’re doing a marriage story in a Sofia Coppola film, just to come back to the actual core of the scene.”
30 days is, in the grand scheme of things, a short shoot, but it is a long time to inhabit another person’s quiet longings and heart-dropping fears; their entire, tangled coming of age. Over 30 days, and over the 110 minutes of the film, Cailee blooms into and out of Priscilla – the eyeliner-slicked, backcombed, frail slip of a girl who comes to learn the heavy price of fame and glamour, the shadowed underworld of everything that had once drawn her in. Inhabiting her so entirely might have taught Cailee much the same thing, if she didn’t already feel it immutably: she has, she tells me, always been wary of the insatiable, vampiric nature of fame, something that no amount of lead roles or prizes can shake.

“I’m pretty cynical about this industry, and I feel very protective of actors and their lives,” she says, guarded and firm. “I don’t think they get treated fairly – this industry can be completely exploitative. [Playing Priscilla] just amplified it, the more I looked at their lives and things that affected them. A lot of the pain came from his fame – he didn’t know how to wrap his head around [it].”
I tell her how surprised I was by the cult of personality that still surrounds Elvis and she agrees (although, as a Southerner who visited Graceland multiple times as a child, it perhaps came as less of a shock). “It is bananas!” she says, echoing my words back to me. “There’s a real sort of subculture. I find it all very odd when people are that fascinated by people’s lives that they don’t know. Which is also why this story needs to be told, I think. Because in all the countless versions of his story that we’ve received, we’ve [never] really been in this interior world with her.”

It’s a difficult line to tread for any young actress – navigating the fine line between the demands of fame as a monster and the possibilities of fame as opportunity. Yet Cailee is confident – and determined – to get it right. “I don’t feel like my personal life is getting mixed in,” she says of her skyrocketing success as Priscilla. “I feel I’m keeping that separate – the attention feels like it’s coming from my work. It’s coming from this movie and my performance and whether people like it or not, from the research I do and the acting that I put on screen, and that’s completely fine.” She shrugs, and smiles. “I’m an artist and I put my art out and I have people judge it.” If Priscilla’s own story was once seen as a fairy tale, Cailee’s is the subversive retelling: the star of the year’s gauziest and gaudiest film, working in the world’s gauziest and gaudiest industry, refusing its gilded cage.

Source: i-d.vice.com

Cailee is on the cover of the current issue of The Sunday Times Style, Click on the gallery link to see all photos.

‘Priscilla’ Star Cailee Spaeny Ignored Other Film Versions of the Presleys, Including Her Best Friend Olivia DeJonge’s

TheWrap magazine: “I just wanted it to come from my time with Priscilla herself,” the actress says
Cailee Spaeny

Cailee Spaeny has played all manner of characters, from a murderous cult member in “Bad Times at the El Royale” to the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “On the Basis of Sex.” But playing Priscilla Presley, wife of the most famous rock ’n’ roller in the world, in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” was a chance for Spaeny to “demystify” a woman whose story many people weren’t aware of.

But Spaeny stayed away from other interpretations of Priscilla Presley, from Susan Walters’ in the 1988 TV movie adaptation of Presley’s 1985 autobiography “Elvis and Me” to her friend Olivia DeJonge’s recent turn in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” because Spaeny feared it would affect her performance. “I just wanted it to come from my time with Priscilla herself, and the book and my own view on it and my opinion on [who] I thought she would be,” she said.

Spaeny, who was born in Tennessee and grew up in Missouri, said her family were huge Elvis fans. But it wasn’t enough just to be a fan; Spaeny was determined to find the humanity behind a woman so often relegated to the shadow of her legendary husband. The real Priscilla Presley offered herself up as a resource for Spaeny—and after a rocky start, the two engaged in several phone calls and one-
on-one interviews. “I had a whole list of questions written out and prepared, over-prepared, for sitting down with her,” Spaeny said. “And the second that she sat down they all went out of my head. There was an awkward silence until she had to then remind me that I’m here asking her questions. Then I was like, ‘Oh, yes, of course. Let’s get into it.’”

What did you ask Priscilla in order to figure out how to play her?

Cailee Spaeny: It was just like, “Take me back to the night that you first met him.” And then letting these questions flow naturally. Asking her, “So you didn’t tell anyone that you went to school with about your time with him?” And her saying, “No,” and me saying, “Well, that must have been a really lonely experience. How did you balance going to high school and also then staying up all night with Elvis and his boys?”

She would tell little details. For example, the first night they met she said she was starving before she went there. She got to the party in Germany, and he made her a sandwich. She said she wanted to eat so badly, but couldn’t imagine eating a sandwich in front of Elvis Presley. And she would laugh like she was right there, back in that moment. So it was those details that were really so essential in putting this puzzle together.

Sofia tells it like you’re entering a memory. It’s very impressionistic. We never stay on a beat too long. It’s an Alice in Wonderland- type dreamland where she’s trying to find her way and then comes out on the other side seeing things more clearly. So it was very important to talk about emotions rather than about events. One of the things she told me is, “Make sure that the love is there.” And I think that me and Jacob [Elordi] held on to that. [We] show the lows but also make sure we show the highs in their relationship because when she talks about these times, she looks back at these memories fondly.

There are so many moments where we see Priscilla surrounded by men, dwarfed by all the activity going on. How did you find a way to stand out in those scenes where Priscilla is made to feel so small?

Jacob and the other actors who are playing the Memphis Mafia were incredibly helpful to me feeling lost in this whirlwind. Those actors are from Toronto and they’re comedians, so they’re improvising the whole time. It always felt like a boy’s world on set and they leaned into that in between takes as well. So I always felt like I was trying to figure out where I fit into this world. Along the way I thought about [how] she was always sort of in character, which she felt like she needed to be in front of him. Trying to fit into this world and never quite clicking in, that’s the way I saw it.

You and Jacob play off each other so well. Did you two spend a lot of time talking out scenes?

There were scenes I’m sure we talked about beforehand, or ones that we found trickier than others. Overall, we wanted to make sure we were comfortable around each other before we went into filming this because we only had 30 days to shoot this movie, and we shot it wildly out of order. I knew I had to feel like I could trust the person [who] was going to be playing Elvis, so the second I found out he got the role I was really excited because I was a fan of his work. I messaged him right away and I wanted us to make sure that we spent time with each other.

What was the challenge for you filming a movie in 30 days?

It was shooting everything out of order and playing an age range from 14 to late 20s, making sure those ages felt genuine and distinct from each other, and that that emotional arc was clear. [That] was always my biggest fear, filming in the way that we did. I always had complete faith in Sofia, but I never wanted to let her down and give her a one-note performance.

There is a very intense sequence between you and Elvis where he throws a chair at your head. What was that day like on set?

That was a funny day because I specifically remember there was a whole thing with the chair. We only had two breakaway chairs. It was tied to a string, which was a safety precaution so it was never going to hit me. They also wanted to have a stunt person throw the chair, but Jacob felt strongly about him being the one to actually throw the chair because it would have hurt the momentum of the scene to stop, yell “cut!” and have someone come in and throw the chair at me. That switch that Jacob did so beautifully was really important. I’m so glad that he fought for making that choice because it really helped my reaction. I was genuinely scared.

The final scene between Priscilla and Elvis is not the final scene of the movie, which ends with Priscilla leaving Graceland. Considering the out-of-order nature of filming, how did you navigate filming that sequence and the finale?

The shot of me driving away from Graceland was shot on day two, I believe. That was really stressful because we only had two takes to shoot that because we were losing light. That scene was tricky to know what I wanted to be doing or saying in that moment because it’s a silent moment. It’s no dialogue but obviously that song [Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”] was so important.

Sofia was so relieved when she got to use that; she had written it into the script. She also had it playing in the backseat of the car when I was filming that scene, which did so much. It was such a personal song between Elvis and Priscilla. Priscilla says that Elvis was singing it to her when they left the courtroom when they were getting their divorce. Elvis always wanted to record that song, it had so many layers. Also, Sofia found it really important to have a female voice at the end of the movie.

That was a crazy day to shoot. I don’t really know how to drive a car, and on the second day of filming I was trying to impress everyone and I was like, “The car is broken.” I just didn’t have it in drive, which was very embarrassing and also really disrupted the mood, but we got there.

Then the other scene [between Elvis and Priscilla], which was the actual last day of filming, was a relief to film. It was so heavy and emotional on the actual last day because my head was swimming through all different sorts of thoughts. To come from southern Missouri, being the small-town girl growing up on Sofia Coppola movies, being such a fan of her work, and then flashing forward to me being 24 on her set and it coming to an end, lent itself to the scene. I know Jacob was feeling the same way. Everyone was emotional to be wrapping the film, and thinking about what the characters were going through at that time wrapped it all together.

Source: thewrap.com

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