Priscilla Trailer: The Strange True Story of Elvis’ Wife Who Finally Gets Her Own Movie

There have been many movies made about Elvis Presley, most recently Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated Elvis, but writer-director Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is the first theatrical feature film to put his ex-wife and the mother of his only child front and center. (In Luhrmann’s Elvis, the rocker’s romance with Priscilla is blazed through in a Swingin’ Sixties montage.) A24 released the first trailer today for Coppola’s film, which adapts Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis & Me. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla opposite Jacob Elordi as Elvis. The teaser is an impressionistic riff on a life spent with someone who literally and figuratively looms over the title character.

Presley’s autobiography — previously made into a 1988 TV miniseries — chronicles how she met Elvis as the 14-year-old daughter of an Air Force officer while the King of Rock ‘n Roll, then 24, was serving in the US Army in Germany. (Yes, you read her age right.) 

Elvis eventually persuaded her parents to send Priscilla over to the US to be with him while she attended a Catholic high school in Memphis. Elvis & Me revealed that Priscilla and Elvis spent years in a romantic relationship that she insists wasn’t fully consummated until their marriage in 1967 when she was 21. Their daughter Lisa Marie Presley, who died earlier this year, was born nine months to the day after their wedding.

The teaser trailer jumps back and forth through time, from the late ‘50s to the ‘70s. The romance between them is evident but so is an underpinning of something off-kilter. Priscilla’s story is one of being crazy in love while living in a bizarre bubble created by the then-unprecedented celebrity Elvis achieved. Elvis was Priscilla’s whole world for about 15 years of her young life. 

In her book and subsequent interviews, Presley recounted the control Elvis had over her, the good times and the bad, and how drugs warped the man she loved into an aberration of his former self. Priscilla’s memoir revealed how determined she was to be with Elvis early on and that her parents never really stood a chance in stopping her from being with him. You get a hint of Priscilla’s discomfort being honest with her parents about Elvis at the end of the trailer when her mom Ann (Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk) asks if she’s met any boys at school.

Priscilla Presley has said she was molded by Elvis to be his ideal woman. She did whatever she could to make sure she lived up to his standards and to make him happy. And she willingly did all that he asked because she loved him and didn’t want to lose him … until she outgrew him.

The Priscilla teaser trailer ends with Priscilla and Elvis, still in their wedding garb, in bed about to consummate their relationship. This moment encapsulates the really weird dynamic between Elvis and Priscilla. She said she spent years begging him to make love to her and he wouldn’t until they were married and that Elvis lost interest in her sexually once she became a mother. That final, passionate moment in the teaser trailer is actually the beginning of the end of their relationship.

The Priscilla teaser trailer doesn’t feature any actual Elvis music. Instead, it uses a song that might illustrate the film’s themes better than “Can’t Help Falling in Love” or “Always on My Mind” could. The trailer plays over the Spectrum song “How You Satisfy Me”. The song’s lyrics summarize the passion, longing, and dependency of someone madly in love:

Honey I want you

Honey I need you

Honey you know just what I need

Come on take me set me free

Well honey won’t you see

How you satisfy me?

Honey I love you

Honey I need you

Ultimately, Priscilla’s story is one of breaking free of Elvis despite the deep love she still feels for him to this day and the fierce protectiveness she has over his legacy. (Elvis died at his Graceland estate on August 16, 1977.)

Elvis and Priscilla divorced in 1972 and actually grew closer as friends after their divorce, according to Priscilla. She found her agency and started her own business. She became an actor (starring opposite Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies) while also taking charge of Graceland and opening it to the public to generate revenue for the estate. Now, after a lifetime of supporting her former husband, Priscilla Presley is receiving the sort of cinematic attention previously reserved for the man she wrote “became my father, husband, and very nearly God.” 

A24 will release Priscilla in theaters in October.