Austin Butler and his now-infamous Elvis Voice might’ve set the world on fire last year, but if any of us had thought (or hoped) that Elvis-mania would come to an end after he collected his gold statuettes at the start of this year… Well, they had another thing comin’, baby.
This year brought not only the tail end of Butler’s Elvis saga but also the start of Jacob Elordi’s time in the jumpsuit with the biopic Priscilla. Meanwhile, drama brewed within Presley’s real-life family, after the death of his daughter Lisa Marie sparked an estate dispute between Elvis’s ex-wife Priscilla and his granddaughter Riley Keough. All that drama was almost enough to leave us all shook up, but as the year eases to a close, things finally appear to be calming down.
In January, Butler stunned the Golden Globes when he delivered his acceptance speech in the King’s unmistakable accent. “Is he going to do this forever?” suspicious minds wondered. “Is it some kind of bit to drum up his odds at the Oscars?” Speaking with ABC after the ceremony, Butler’s vocal coach swore his lapses into the accent were “not a put on.” But soon after, in February, Butler announced that he was “getting rid of” the drawl, which by then had become a symbol of the rigorous preparations he’d taken for the role—including, he said, not seeing his family for three years.
In a normal year, this would have been the end of all the Elvis talk. But then, in November, we got Priscilla—Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Priscilla Presley, who was 14 years old when she met Elvis and married him at the age of 21, when he was 32 years old. As one might have predicted, fan wars immediately began, with Butler on one side and Priscilla headliner (and Euphoria star) Elordi on the other.
Although Elordi clearly took his role seriously—Coppola told GQ that the actor used his Elvis voice whenever he was on set—he also didn’t seem quite as obsessive as Butler. Journalist Gabriella Paiella observed that Elordi had dropped the accent by the time they sat down for their GQ interview in November, and, during a late-night interview weeks before, Elordi had already confessed to Jimmy Fallon that before joining the project, all of his Elvis knowledge had come from the Disney film Lilo and Stitch.
This revelation fueled the pervading narrative in the Battle of the Pelvises—that Butler was the hyper-dedicated, perhaps over-the-top performer of the two who took the role as seriously as his own life, while Elordi jumped into the sequined jumpsuit and breezed through. (Never mind that Elordi is the one who confessed to eating a pound of bacon per day as he got into character—apparently that’s casual!) The presumed dichotomy calls to mind one famous showbiz anecdote, concerning a horrified Laurence Olivier’s response to Dustin Hoffman’s Method preparations for a scene in the 1976 film Marathon Man: “My dear boy,” he asked, “why don’t you just try acting?” (Hoffman has since said he hadn’t slept because he was partying, The Guardian notes—not out of commitment to the role.)
As one might expect, both Elordi and Butler have poured cold water on the comparisons; at one point, Elordi called them “fucking absurd.” Nevertheless, the discourse persisted.
Beyond the discussions of the dueling Elvises, disharmony also broke out in Graceland this year when Priscilla Presley challenged the “authenticity and validity” of an amendment to the late Lisa Marie Presley’s trust, which edged out both Priscilla and her daughter’s former business manager, Barry Siegel. The amendment named Lisa Marie’s children—Daisy Jones and the Six star Riley Keough and the now-deceased Benjamin Keough—as the sole trustees. The dispute hung over the family for months, as control over Elvis’s trust hung in the balance. By May, however, the dispute had been settled, leaving Riley in charge of her grandfather’s estate.
“When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives,” Keough told Vanity Fair in August. “Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us. Everyone was in a bit of a panic to understand how we move forward, and it just took a minute to understand the details of the situation, because it’s complicated. We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had.” She also confirmed that things were “happy” between herself and Priscilla: “They’ve never not been happy.”
At this point, it seems that Graceland is finally at peace. The only burning question that remains unanswered seems to be whether Elordi’s Priscilla performance could snag him the trophy that Butler narrowly missed out on when he lost to Brendan Fraser at the Academy Awards in March. Those craving a little less Elvis conversation might get their wish after next year’s Oscars ceremony, but until then, he’ll likely always be on our minds.
