Before there was Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny revealed that her first collaboration with Sofia Coppola was an eventually scrapped version of The Little Mermaid. “My first-ever callback was through Sofia,” the Alien: Romulus star told Empire. “It was for [Coppola’s] The Little Mermaid, [which] ended up not getting made.
I sent this weird self-tape, playing a mermaid with no dialogue.” In true Coppola fashion, Spaeny said it was “very strange and avant-garde.” In 2017, Spaeny and Coppola crossed paths again, when the actress auditioned for The Beguiled, a period drama starring Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell and Elle Fanning. “That didn’t end up working out,” Spaeny recalled. “I was crushed, because Sofia is the director that I zeroed in on as a young teenage girl, especially living in the Bible Belt.
There’s something so freeing [in her work] and something that wasn’t really talked about for young women where I grew up. She took young girls seriously.
It really spoke to me on a personal level.” But it was through the previous two experiences that Spaeny landed her breakout role as Priscilla Presley in the eponymous 2023 film co-starring Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley. “Then I got a call that [Coppola] wanted to meet me in New York.
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