Cailee Spaeny Jokes She and Jacob Elordi Were 'Good Study Buddies' When Researching for Priscilla

Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi did their Presley homework.

As Spaeny, 25, and Elordi, 26, spoke at a New York Film Festival press conference for Sofia Coppola's new movie Priscilla Friday, they said they put their brains together to keep track of the timeline of Elvis Presley's relationship with Priscilla Presley as the film weaves in and out between 1959 and 1973.

"There is no gap in Cailee's performance," Elordi said when asked how the actors approached moments where significant time passes within moments in the movie. "I would go [on set] — and I'm fairly well prepared performer — and I would say, 'What year is this?' And she would pull out a script and she had every single thing catalogued to the year. So any in-between, Cailee would know exactly what had happened in those sort of suggestive blanks."

"We were good study buddies," Spaeny joked. "We'd be like, 'This [scene] is looking like '65!' "

Elordi added that he and Spaeny "were pretty dorky about the whole thing."

"I sort of built Elvis and Cailee built Priscilla [as characters], and I think we kind of met in the middle on those gaps to where we we had our own language of the entire timeline, not just what was shown on screen," he said.

Priscilla tracks the famous couple's relationship from when Elvis and Priscilla, now 78, first met in Germany to Priscilla's decision to divorce the music icon in the early '70s. Along the way, the couple had one daughter, the late Lisa Marie Presley.

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Spaeny, who previously appeared in 2018's On the Basis of Sex and 2021's How It Ends, told reporters that Priscilla "was very gracious with her time" when they first met to the discuss the role, which turned into a four-hour conversation.

"For her to take that time and really go through the story and relive everything again with me, and I really tried to make sure it didn't feel like I was trying to [interrogate her] or something," Spaeny said. "I just tried to sit back and see how much she felt comfortable telling me."

"But just being in front of her and in her presence was so informative in how I tried to do my own version of her story," she added. "She's a woman from a different time, a different generation. She's American royalty, really. So the way she holds herself now and in [preparing], all the mannerisms and how she speaks and how she goes about life is very important."

Priscilla is in theaters Nov. 3.