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. We had coffee, and then she pulled out her iPad and started showing me photos of Priscilla Presley,” Spaeny said.
Spaeny, who will be in the second season of Netflix’s Beef, was filming Civil War alongside frequent Coppola collaborator Dunst at the time she got the call.
“I think [Dunst] was watching me to see what she thought of me,” she said. “I don’t know what she said to Sofia, but she said something, but then by the end of filming Civil War, I found out that I got the role of Priscilla.”
In fact, Dunst gave her some tips on how to acclimate to a set run by Coppola, after having endured the gruesome, dystopian world of Civil War: “We’d just done this incredibly intense war film, with tons of explosions. It was very disorientating, and Kirsten was like, ‘[Priscilla] will be the opposite. It’s just so relaxed and chill, and you’re just going to have the best time and Sofia is going to be playing music and you’re going to be sad in the bathtub.’ And all those things were right!”
In 2014, Coppola was developing a live-action Little Mermaid with Universal and Working Title, with the project being based on the “much darker” original fairy tale, as opposed to the light-hearted Disney version. The pic fell through when a studio executive questioned how the film would appeal to older men: “Yes, there was [a breaking point]. I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ Coppola later said. “And I just didn’t know what to say. I just was not in my element.”