Jacob Elordi Had Just 3 Weeks Between Filming ‘Saltburn’ and ‘Priscilla’ (2024)

At first, Jacob Elordi wasn’t so sure he’d be able to pull off starring in two major films back-to-back after he was simultaneously cast in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.

The Australian actor, known for his breakout role in Euphoria, ended up filming them just three weeks apart, first heading to the UK for Saltburn, in which he plays a wealthy Oxford student named Felix who invites a less popular classmate (Barry Keoghan) to his posh estate for the summer. He then transformed into the King of Rock and Roll for Priscilla, which captures the complicated relationship between Elvis and Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny).

If the roles have anything in common, it’s the fact that Elordi is captivating in both. He nimbly jumps from playing a posh British kid in the year 2006 to portraying an American music icon in the 1960s. It almost makes you forget that Elordi, as can be heard in his Little Gold Men interview, is Australian.

Priscilla and Saltburn, both currently in theaters after debuting at festivals, are garnering Eloridi awards attention, but no matter where the path leads to from here, the actor says the massive challenge of these back-to-back projects has transformed him. “I had to climb this giant mountain, and there’s this moment when you get over it and you do it, and then people liked it,” he says. “I think I gained…maybe confidence is the wrong word, but I’ll use it. I feel a lot more confident. I feel like what I think I’m capable of has sort of been confirmed to myself a little bit, and hopefully I don’t lose that.”

Vanity Fair: Do you think these two roles have anything in common?

Jacob Elordi: That’s a funny question. I made Priscilla three weeks after Saltburn. So they’re strangely both meshed together in my head because I’d shoot all day in London, and then I’d go home to my Elvis cave, which was my hotel room, which was sort of all pictures of Priscilla. But I think, other than both of them having a kind of ginormous house between Saltburn and Graceland, I’m not sure if Felix has too much of Elvis Presley in it.

Is it difficult for you to let one go and jump into the next? Do you need more than three weeks, in a perfect world?

I think that the short time is what made it work for me in my head. If I’d had too long to worry about it, I would have been in a bit of strife because I would have overthought the whole thing. I had to do this British accent in Saltburn, so I got to lose that really quickly when I went into the Memphis drawl. But having the three weeks just gave me not a lot of time to worry about it. But at the time before I’d started both of them, I thought it was going to be impossible because I’d gotten them around the same time.

Saltburn is fun to watch with an audience because it is visceral, and so there are moments that you get to feel the audience react. What is it like for you to watch that film with an audience?

I snuck into a screening of it in my hometown, and it was unbelievable. I haven’t been in a movie like that since maybe I saw the first of the new Star Wars movies in theaters. It was kind of surreal seeing it with Saltburn because there’s no IP or anything. It’s a new story, and to see people invested in the storylines and to hear them gasping and yelling and hearing people in the drain scene go, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, God, no.”

Why did you feel like Felix would be an interesting character to take on?

I had met with Emerald, a couple of years ago now, in LA, and we had a general meeting and she was so vague about what the movie was. I was just so intrigued. And then I got the script and I just knew that I had to be in it. So then I happened to be in the UK a couple of months after that and I got to audition for Emerald, which was my first audition outside of sort of COVID times. It was the first one back, so it was just terribly nerve-racking. It brought me back to what performance was like, what it really is to be in the room and work for a role.

I’ve talked to Emerald on this podcast, and she specifically said you brought something that a lot of the other actors who auditioned didn’t, where Felix can seem like this object of desire and he’s charismatic and all of this, but that you sort of showed that he’s also sort of weak. I’m curious what you found in the layers of who Felix was?

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.

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.

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