‘Priscilla’: Read The Screenplay For Sofia Coppola’s Biopic Telling The Untold Story Of The King’s Queen

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla. Based on the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me co-authored by Priscilla Presley and Sandra Harmon, the script was adapted by Coppola who also directed.

The story begins when teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis at a party and the man who is already a meteoric rock-and-roll superstar becomes someone entirely unexpected in private moments: a thrilling crush, an ally in loneliness, a vulnerable best friend. From Priscilla’s point of view, the film looks at the unseen side of a great American myth in Elvis and Priscilla’s long courtship and turbulent marriage.

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Cailee Spaeny plays the eponymous role, for which she won a Best Actress Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. Jacob Elordi plays Elvis.

At the world premiere in Venice, the real Priscilla Presley choked up when she took the mic and told the press corps, “It’s very difficult to sit and watch a film about you and about your life and about your love. Sofia did an amazing job, she did her homework.”

Coppola said she was drawn to the project because she was “so struck with how the setting is so unusual but she goes through all of the things that all girls go through growing up into womanhood — her first kiss and becoming a mother — all of these moments I could relate to, but in this very unusual setting that we’re so curious to know.”

Adapting the memoir for the screen marked Coppola’s first real foray into living history. Re-reading the book, she told Deadline’s Joe Utichi, “it grabbed me in a way where I could see this enticing, inspiring visual world of Graceland and 1960s Memphis. It was something I’d never done, and it was so Americana.”

In her Deadline review, Stephanie Bunbury wrote that Coppola’s “stylistic pizzazz overcomes the dull sense that we know exactly what is going to happen.” The details she shows, “are like an additional narrative rippling across the facts we already know.” The “strength” of Coppola’s films “is that seems to see everything.”

A24 released Priscilla domestically November 3; it has grossed nearly $21 million to date.

Click below to read the script.

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