Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, says that he gorged on a pound of bacon a day to play later-life Elvis in the biographical drama. The movie based on the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley stars Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla.
Priscilla chronicles Elvis and Priscilla's relationship from their first meeting in 1959 to the early 1970s. In Entertainment Weekly‘s Around the Table video series, Coppola, Spaeny, and Elordi discuss how the real Priscilla Presley gave them valuable information about the King and his young bride.
“Priscilla told us that Elvis liked really burned bacon,” Coppola says.
“I averaged like a pound of bacon a day,” Elordi adds. “It's not that noticeable because I'm quite long. But I was the biggest I've ever been.”
Sofia Coppola Was Surprised by How Little She Knew About Priscilla Presley
Coppola says that she started reading Elvis and Me at the beginning of the pandemic and was fascinated by Priscilla Presley's openness and candor. “I was really surprised because I realized how little we know about her,” Coppola says. “They're such a mythic, famous couple — Elvis and Priscilla — but when I read her story, I had no idea she was going to high school while she was living in Graceland. I was really impressed with how she really reveals what their life was like, what her experience was growing up in such an over-the-top setting. Also, I was surprised with how universal it was [and] how relatable it was.”
Coppola, Spaeny, and Elordi had access to Presley home movies and photographs. “Probably the most helpful part was ignoring the mythology and trying to find out where the real person lies in that,” says Elordi. “We had the freedom of going to a place where he wasn't so well documented, behind closed doors, so I could play with it a little bit and try to make it a bit more grounded and attempt to make it sound more human.”
The official Priscilla production notes describe Coppola's film as follows:
“By the age of 21, she was one of the most famous women in the world, the symbolic queen of American rock and roll. Yet Priscilla Presley, the long-time love and only wife of Elvis, was barely known at all. Her narrative has long been eclipsed by the overwhelming heat and flash of his, but within its contours lies an alternate and private history, though one mirroring the culture—a girl’s story of yearning, growing up inside a lushly fabricated fairy tale, and ultimately awakening to very real personal desires and the layers and complexities of power.
“Sofia Coppola presents a view of Priscilla’s time with Elvis from the mysterious interior. The tale unfolds like an intimate memory from a childlike, dreamy, but eventually widening point of view, as Priscilla lives out an alternately tantalizing, suffocating, and transforming fantasy, and experiences a singularly American coming-of-age. Her story spans from age 14—when she first meets Elvis as a bored, lonely Air Force brat living in Germany—to 24, when she departs the candy-colored dreamland of Graceland as a young mother hungry to explore her own unwritten future. In the decade between, Coppola handcrafts an immersive, deliciously glamorous existence, but also a delicate, close-up vision of a young woman clamoring to define herself in a world where she’s constantly defined by others.”
Priscilla opens in theaters nationwide on November 3.