Jacob Elordi Is NOT Using His Elvis Voice on the 'Priscilla' Press Tour
Jacob Elordi arrived at a press conference for his upcoming film Priscilla today speaking in his natural Australian accent. (Yes, Elordi is from Brisbane.) The event, held as part of the New York Film Festival, saw the cast and crew of Sofia Coppola's Priscilla Presley biopic answering questions about the movie. Elordi, who plays The King of Rock and Roll himself, ditched his Memphis drawl from the film to comment on his work in a male version of Nicole Kidman's "We make movies betta" Australian twang.
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This is relevant, of course, because for the entirety of last year Austin Butler, who played Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, conducted interviews in a thick Tennessee accent despite hailing from Anaheim. Butler, who spent the Elvis press circuit regaling press with feats of method acting, worked for three years on his Elvis impersonation. He didn't see people for months on end, spoke in Elvis's accent the entire time and had to be hospitalized after shooting because of how intense the experience was for him. So intense that even though filming wrapped in March 2021, Butler was still speaking with a Southern accent in March 2023 when the Oscars rolled around.
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Butler's completely unrecognizable speaking voice became so polarizing that his accent coach had to do an interview claiming that the change was physical and not something to do with Butler's mental state. Only towards the end of the press tour, when the internet's disdain had reached an all-time high, did Butler announce that he was slowly losing the accent.
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By contrast, Elordi, who filmed Priscilla over 30 days in late 2022, is now using a non-Elvis speaking voice (and has been for quite some time). During the NYFF press conference, he shared how he prepared for the role (which, spoiler alert, did not involve three years in seclusion and a hospital visit).
"The biggest thing that we had also spoken about earlier on was, I mean, if you want to see an Elvis impersonator, you can go to Vegas. I think it was about catching the essence of this person, and the biggest thing for me was trying to identify and find where the human being was under all the glitz and the gold and the voice and the caricatures and all these things."
Elordi went on to say, "It was a search to find the kind of real-life element and also that [real element] in the relationship. Cailee [Spaeny, who plays Priscilla] and I spoke about how there were days where we would just imagine that it was a Sofia Coppola marriage drama, like completely separate from Elvis and Priscilla."
One cannot imagine Butler even for a second thinking of his portrayal as "completely separate from Elvis." In fact, stay tuned to see if Butler still sounds like Elvis in Dune 2.
