Trailer
Plot summary
Elvis Presley grows up in Tupelo, Mississippi, raised mostly by his mother Gladys, taking comfort in music and comic books. The family moves to Memphis, Tennessee, where his love of the Black music played on Beale Street sets him apart from his peers. Colonel Tom Parker, a carnival huckster managing the country singer Hank Snow, hears "That's All Right" and assumes the performer is black, then sees the effect Elvis has on the audience at a Louisiana Hayride performance. Parker offers him a place on tour and persuades him to hand over his career. Elvis moves from Sun Records to RCA, his father Vernon takes charge of the business side, and the family leaves poverty behind. Segregationist Senator James Eastland questions Parker about his past, and Elvis's stage moves bring legal trouble.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Elvis (2022)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While making Elvis, Baz Luhrmann had 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm footage, including outtakes from Elvis: That's the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour and the 1957 "gold lamé jacket" Hawaii performance, pulled from Warner Bros. archives deep in Kansas salt mines. Restored over two years, it became the separate documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.
- Austin Butler beat frontrunners Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Harry Styles to play Elvis Presley, after impressing Baz Luhrmann with an audition tape of himself singing "Unchained Melody".
- Baz Luhrmann got a call from Denzel Washington recommending Austin Butler for the lead in Elvis; Washington had worked with Butler on a 2018 theater production of The Iceman Cometh.
- Elvis premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival to a twelve-minute standing ovation from the audience, the longest for an Australian film at the festival and tied with Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker for the longest overall.
- After Elvis finished shooting in March 2021, Austin Butler was hospitalized and bedridden for a week with a virus that simulated appendicitis.
- In Elvis, Austin Butler's vocals are used when Presley is young, blended with Presley's own recordings when he is older; Luhrmann released a 2019 test shoot of Butler singing "That's All Right" on set to prove it.
