Jacob Elordi doesn’t need folks all shook up over his and Austin Butler’s Elvis Presley impersonations.
“I don’t know why folks make artwork a blood sport,” Elordi, 26, mentioned throughout a Friday, November 3, interview with E! Information. “They flip into the Colosseum. It’s f–king absurd.” The actor added that his and Butler’s movies, through which they each painting Presley, would make a “killer double function.”
Whereas Butler, 32, took on the function of Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic — which earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award for Greatest Actor in a Drama Movement Image — Elordi is enjoying the King of Rock and Roll in Sofia Coppola’s 2023 movie Priscilla. The film is impressed by Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, which particulars the love story of Priscilla and Elvis. The twosome had been married from 1967 to 1973 and shared daughter Lisa Marie Presley.
Whereas Priscilla, 85, has been open about her help for the movie — telling audiences on the Venice Worldwide Movie Pageant in September that Coppola did an “superb” job — the depiction of her and Elvis’ romance, which started when she was 14 and he was 24, has sparked controversy.
Though Lisa Marie brazenly praised Luhrmann’s Elvis, she took challenge with Coppola’s script. Earlier than her demise, Lisa Marie despatched the director — who additionally cowrote the film — a sequence of emails asking her to not transfer ahead with the undertaking. (Lisa Marie died in January on the age of 54 from the consequences of a small bowel obstruction.)
“My father solely comes throughout as a predator and manipulative,” Lisa Marie wrote within the September 2022 messages, which had been obtained by Selection. “As his daughter, I don’t learn this and see any of my father on this character. I don’t learn this and see my mom’s perspective of my father. I learn this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t perceive why?”
Lisa Marie additionally warned that she would converse out in opposition to the film and her mom. “I will likely be compelled to be ready the place I must brazenly say how I really feel in regards to the movie and go in opposition to you, my mom, and this movie publicly,” she mentioned.
In response, Coppola mentioned she hoped Lisa Marie would change her thoughts after she acquired to see a remaining lower of the film. “I hope that if you see the ultimate movie, you’ll really feel in a different way, and perceive I’m taking nice care in honoring your mom, whereas additionally presenting your father with sensitivity and complexity,” Coppola replied, per Selection.
Elordi, in the meantime, instructed E! Information on Friday that it was his job to “respect Priscilla’s e book” after it was talked about that he was “enjoying kind of a facet of Elvis that individuals could not wish to see.”
“It’s all there on paper and, you already know, I’ve had conversations with [Priscilla],” he mentioned. “So, for me, it was portraying this individual the way in which that she had described him within the moments that she had described.”
Elordi is not any stranger to difficult characters. He performed “unhealthy boy” Noah Flynn in The Kissing Sales space trilogy alongside Joey King and Joel Courtney and can be the face of the haunted — and at occasions abusive — Nate Jacobs on HBO’s Euphoria.
When requested why he was “so good at enjoying troubled males,” Elordi replied, “I don’t know if it’s essentially all the time troubled males. It’s simply I get pleasure from enjoying advanced folks.”