The 5 Stages of Priscilla’s Life as Told Through Wigs
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While all of us tend to change and experiment with our identities between the ages of 14 and 27, precisely one person got to do that under the watchful gaze of Elvis Presley. “Priscilla” doesn’t give its eponymous heroine (Cailee Spaeny) monologues about what she feels as she falls in and out of love with the King (Jacob Elordi), but one of the pleasures of Sofia Coppola’s film is that the audience can track Priscilla’s growth through how she presents herself. Which, of course, involves going to the hair salon at least once a week.
Hair designer Cliona Furey created five main wigs that could be styled for individual sequences to take us through Priscilla’s growing maturity, both a creative and a logistical challenge in a montage-rich film with over 120 different looks for the Lady of Graceland.
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“Wigs were actually quicker to use than trying to manipulate someone’s hair — [when shooting out of order,] how can you make the hair different colors for it to be good, to be well done?” Furey told IndieWire. “The key is the person has to know how to work with wigs and apply the wig well, but you have to have really good quality wigs, too. Not every production has worked with good quality wigs so some directors are frightened of them. Sofia was open to it.”
Furey had both the advantage of starting her career as a wigmaker and owning some very well-made wigs (it takes six to eight weeks to make just one convincing one) that became the foundations for both Priscilla’s and Elvis’ hairstyles in the film. The choice to go with wigs allowed the filmmakers to deftly shift between eras. Furey started with a “Young Germany” wig that was more natural and not as thick as the looks to come, but then fully embraced the great cultural forces of Elvis and the 1960s.
“[When she first colors her hair black,] she has a little bang and she’s still young, trying to look older, and we called that Baby Glam. Those were her Baby Glam days, when she’s still in school, living at Graceland, and trying to look more womanly. It’s a little longer than shoulder length with a bang, which kept her youthful,” Furey said.
From there, Furey expanded into Memphis Glam, the Family Portrait look that is the apex of Priscilla’s and Elvis’s public relationship, and then a ‘70s Hollywood look that returns Priscilla back to her natural hair color. “I tried to make the last wig similar because it was my little sideline thing to say she’s herself again. She’s natural and she goes through this whole journey in the story and so does her hair. She finds herself again as she leaves him,” Furey said.
What differentiates all the wigs is variations in length, color, thickness, and volume. Furey gradually lengthened Priscilla’s hair and embraced stiffer, more stationary wigs with bigger hair during Priscilla’s Glam phases. The shifts are a quiet but constant visual clue of how adept she becomes at presenting an image to her audience, Elvis.
Furey and Spaeny collaborated on tweaks that would align with Priscilla’s desires in a given scene. Both were excited to reach for looks that Priscilla Presley wasn’t photographed with but would be true to her sense of style inside the walls of Graceland and the private moments of a date at the roller rink.
“Cailee would be in the chair and I’d have 10 minutes to do something [new]. I’d get the wig on, but now I have to change the style because now we’re doing the date at the roller rink, and I said, ‘What do you think if I pull the sides back and do a half up down with the big boof?’” Furey said. “We were constantly checking in with each other along the way.”
Check-ins were also key because Furey’s team and their counterparts in costume and makeup had to quickly shift the actors between eras. “The ADs, the people who made the call sheets, had to know, ‘Oh, this is Natural Glam going into Baby Glam and now we’re going into Memphis Glam. Now we’re going into the Family Portrait look,” Furey said. “The hair, makeup, and costumes were a huge part of determining time and where Cailee and Jacob would be, and when, and what they were doing.”
As Priscilla herself discovers when dating and being married to Elvis, it’s a huge amount of effort to get everything looking perfect. Furey’s work to recreate public moments led her to use vintage hair pieces that Priscilla herself would’ve gravitated to. “I can tell in her picture when she had Lisa Marie at the hospital that she had her hair done. I can tell she’s got pieces in her hair. I did the same thing with Cailee,” Furey said.
But the effort in crafting and revamping all the hairstyles across the film finds a middle way between historical recreation and more private, psychologically inflected styles. “What I really dove into was how to find that balance and take a little creative license and find that look without doing cosplay looks, but still be true to the historical accuracy of those moments,” Furey said.
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