The actress has the attention of awards voters for her Venice-winning turn in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla.
“When I was 14, like Priscilla, I was standing in the kitchen with my parents convincing them to take me to Los Angeles.” Cailee Spaeny is explaining how she found her way into the world of Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley), whom she portrays in Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla.
Their Tinseltown visits span decades and intentions — Spaeny’s in 2013 to pursue performing, Beaulieu’s in 1962 to reunite with Elvis Presley whom she had met three years before in Germany — but the feeling resonates. “We were at a similar age when we were having this conversation with our parents, and our parents were sort of terrified and not knowing what to do with their child. ‘Do we give them want they want? Will it ruin their life?’” says the 25-year-old. “That was my own version of entering this strange world of high pressure and trying to find my way around and trying to break through.”
And break through she did.
In 2018, the Tennessee-born, Missouri-raised actress had an explosive Hollywood debut with roles in Pacific Rim: Uprising, On The Basis Of Sex and Bad Times At The El Royale all landing in cinemas that year. Spaeny went on to head teen-witch reboot The Craft: Legacy, as well as appearing in Alex Garland’s mini-series Devs, before starring as the murder victim that drives the narrative in HBO detective drama Mare Of Easttown in 2021.
Priscilla sees her biggest role to date, with a performance that has already earned her the Volpi Cup for best actress at Venice, where the film premiered. A24 released the drama in the US in early November, grossing $19.6m at press time, while the UK is set for December 26 via Mubi.
Already on Coppola’s radar —Spaeny’s first callback in Hollywood was for a project with the director that did not come to fruition — the actress had no idea what to expect when Coppola asked to meet up in New York out of the blue. “We had coffee, and we were just sort of chatting and I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’” the actress tells Screen International while attending the BFI London Film Festival. “And then she just pulled out her iPad and started showing me photos of Priscilla Presley.”
With a good word put in from Kirsten Dunst, with whom Spaeny had worked on her second Garland collaboration Civil War, the actress was promptly cast without so much as a line read. “Sofia just has such a clear vision. She knows who she wants and what she wants to do,” enthuses Spaeny about the director, whose filmography she first encountered at the age of 14 when she watched The Virgin Suicides (coincidentally starring Dunst). “It was the first time I had ever asked myself, ‘Who’s behind the camera.’”
Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis And Me, on which Coppola’s screenplay is based, served as Spaeny’s bible in preparation, but the actress also had the chance to meet the author, who serves as an executive producer on the film.
“I saw her walking across the restaurant and sitting down, and everything just went out of my mind,” Spaeny recalls of their first meeting, for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was followed by several phone calls.
“It’s such a gift because you’re getting these golden nuggets along the way of very detailed stories, or moments or emotions, or things that just help put the puzzle pieces together.”
During 30 days of filming in late 2022, Spaeny would regularly find herself switching from a 14-year-old lovestruck teen to a 23-year-old young mother in the space of a day. Costume and styling proved pivotal in helping the actress recalibrate herself in these moments, and Spaeny recalls a particularly stressful afternoon trying to shoot the scene where Priscilla and Elvis emerge from the hospital with their newborn.
“We were losing light, and hair and make-up wanted to get it just right because it was such an iconic look,” explains Spaeny, who was promptly handed a week-old baby. “I’m also in heels and I’ve got this real baby! Every day had its own fun challenge, but we always found a way somehow.”
In the film’s more-intimate scenes, Spaeny was grateful for the bond she had formed early on with co-star Jacob Elordi — the Australian actor currently making waves in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.
They first met at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles to watch the 1946 film noir Gilda, and soon after went horseback riding, just as Elvis and Priscilla had done 60 years before. “We both understood that we had to really trust each other and have a certain closeness by the time we got on set,” Spaeny says. “Because it was sort of chaos from there.”
Yellow brick road
It was the promise of a music career, and not acting, that had Spaeny standing in her kitchen, begging her parents to take her to Los Angeles. The actress had recently dropped out of school (“I was just really bad at it”) and was singing in a rock cover band called NRG with some friends. After performing at a local festival in her Missouri hometown of Springfield, a man gave her his card and said he “knew someone who knew a guy”.
“It was like the most insane pitch but that was it for me. Someone knows someone in LA, we’re going and that’s enough,” says Spaeny. After securing an agent on that first trip, “four years of no’s” soon followed despite the regular 25-hour trips to Los Angeles that the then-teenager was making with her mother in a minivan. “Nothing was hitting. There was no sign of that working out.”
Spaeny was having better success with her local theatre troupe, with a role in The Wizard Of Oz — as Dorothy, of course. During the run, Spaeny received a callback for a Nickelodeon show and asked her theatre director for the time off. She was furious: “She said I had to pick one or the other.” Spaeny chose to stay loyal to the Springfield Little Theatre company.
Now her star looks set to keep rising. A24’s action drama Civil War is releasing next spring while Spaeny also heads the ninth Alien instalment, Romulus, which Disney’s 20th Century Studios has set for release in August 2024.
“There’s some roles that come my way that everyone around me thinks is a good move and I have absolutely no drive or ambition to do it,” Spaeny reveals. “My gauge so far has been to just try to do whatever feels the most opposite from the last thing I’ve done or that challenges me in a completely different way. Luckily, I’ve been able to pull that off so far.”
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