Jacob Elordi's Tight Schedule: Filming 'Saltburn' to 'Priscilla' Within 3 Weeks

Article by Rebecca Ford

Jacob Elordi was initially unsure about his ability to star in two major films consecutively after being cast in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn at the same time.

Best known for his breakthrough role in Euphoria, the Australian actor filmed both movies within a three-week span. He first travelled to the UK to shoot Saltburn, where he portrayed a wealthy Oxford student named Felix who invites a less known classmate (played by Barry Keoghan) over to his high-end estate for the summer. Immediately after, he transitioned into the role of the King of Rock and Roll in Priscilla, which encapsulates the complex relationship between Elvis and Priscilla Presley (played by Cailee Spaeny).

One commonality that these contrasting roles have is Elordi's magnetic performance. He smoothly transitions from playing a high-class British youth from 2006 to depicting a 1960s American music legend. An interview on Little Gold Men reminds viewers that despite his spot-on accents, Elordi is indeed Australian.

With Priscilla and Saltburn both running in cinemas and receiving appraisal following festival premieres, Elordi's future in the film industry looks bright. According to the actor, these back-to-back roles have boosted his confidence by affirming his capabilities as an actor.

In a chat with Vanity Fair, Elordi shared that the roles were meshed together in his mind, having filmed Priscilla just three weeks after Saltburn. He noted that beyond the characters' respective grand estates, there wasn't much similarity between Felix and Elvis.

Elordi enjoys filming with a short interval between project. He believe the time constraint prevented him from overthinking his performances. Capturing a British accent in Saltburn and promptly switching to a Memphis drawl for Priscilla posed a unique challenge, but the actor managed to pull it off.

The actor had the opportunity to watch Saltburn with an audience, an experience he described as "visceral". It reminded him of his experience watching the new Star Wars movies in theaters.

According to Elordi, the decision to portray Felix in Saltburn came after a conversation with Fennell. Despite the vagueness surrounding the movie, Elordi found himself drawn to the script. His audition in the UK marked his first non-COVID-era audition and allowed him to reconnect with live performance.

In an earlier podcast, Fennell mentioned that Elordi brought something unique to the audition. He was able to depict Felix as an object of desire and a charismatic yet also weak character, which added depth to the role.

It’s kind of uninteresting to sort of play tropes and ideas in films, and I think I’ve done them before. So it was the same thing playing Elvis—I try to kind of find, like, a back door into the character. I try to sort of find them when they’re 10 years old, 11 years old, 12 years old. I try to find, like, the little boy in them. And I think…the clearest thing to me with Felix was he’s born with an immense amount of privilege, but he’s not born with this swagger and strut. You have to kind of develop that and learn that, and a lot of the time the people that you meet that have that kind of sensibility, it usually comes from a place of great insecurity or misunderstanding of their place in the world.

Where do you get inspiration from when you’re preparing to film Saltburn?

I’d called Emerald because she knows the world a lot more than I do. She sent me a list of films and books to read. I took myself out to Palm Springs for two weeks and just locked myself away and wore only linen and walked around a swimming pool trying to find this accent. I read Brideshead Revisited and just studied that sort of English literature and that world of immense privilege as best I could. Then I got to London four weeks before filming. I lived in Chelsea, and I would just go down to the coffee shops and listen to people talk and order their flat whites. That was kind of the final puzzle piece to realize you couldn’t really go too far with it.

Priscilla

Was there any scene in particular that you felt more intimidated by or you felt like you had to put in a little more work to prepare for?

I think it was as soon as we got to the summer house, because my family came into it. It was more a personal fear of, Okay, I have to be English around Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan. If anyone’s going to see through you, it’s going to be Rosamund Pike. Do you know what I mean? There was something very daunting about coming out to the house, because that’s also where everything unravels and you start to see the pieces of Felix that aren’t college bravado.

When it came to Priscilla, was there one item of research that ended up being really valuable in your preparation?

Peter Guralnick’s books [Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley] were incredibly helpful. It’s full of information, but a great sadness sort of washed over me when I was reading them because you just feel this meteoric plummet to hell, basically. His life was a tragedy in so many ways. Then the things that kind of helped me with finding the human being that I wanted to portray was there were these home videos called Elvis by the Presleys. And there was all this sort of silent Super 8 footage of him over the years. And you got to see him playing with Priscilla and swimming and eating food like a child. You can really see the little boy in him. It was that and then there was one song that kind of tied me to it the whole time, and it was his version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and every day I would listen to that before going on set.

Were there songs that you listened to before Saltburn?

Emerald had made us a wicked playlist of 2007 bangers, but before getting there, I had this idea that he would be kind of annoyingly alt, so I had the Smiths and a lot of David Bowie playing. A lot of that kind of British ’80s rock-pop sort of stuff.

So what are you looking for next in your career?

I think it’s always changing. The one thing that I’m lucky enough now to have is the ability to kind of choose a little bit. I just want to work with artists. I’ve loved art my whole life, really, and I just want to work with filmmakers who have a specific point of view, or a feeling about something, and they want to leave that mark on the world and in history. That’s what movies are to me.