With her loose brunette hair, flowing clothes, precise speech and sparkling eyes, Cailee Spaeny, 25, holds up a smiling, confident mirror to the American women of her generation. Yet it was by lending her features to an icon from another age, Priscilla Presley, that she revealed her talents as an actress, going on to win the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival in September. In Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, she reveals the strength of character of a woman long reduced to the status of Elvis's wife, whose emancipation resonates with many of today's struggles, beyond the apparent obsolescence of her attire. In a video interview from her apartment overlooking New York's Central Park, the actress reflects on the role she seemed cut out for.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before, I was a massive Sofia Coppola fan. I'm from Middle America. I'm from Missouri, from a fairly small town. My dad was a construction worker and also a salesman. My mom did all sorts of stuff, whatever to pay the bills. A very blue-collar family from the Midwest. I grew up watching big-budget movies in the house, whether that was something like Top Gun or Titanic. When I stumbled upon Sofia Coppola's work with Virgin Suicides, it was my first time experiencing independent cinema. It was the first time I ever asked myself who's behind the camera. And then I watched her whole filmography of work from start to finish. Her films spoke to me in a certain way that I had never felt before: the way that she depicted teenagers, young girls, in her movies; the way that she gave them agency and her boldness; the way that she tells her films through the intimateness, the quietness; and the way that she shows loneliness.
Sofia was one of the first directors who gave me one of my first callbacks when I was still living in Missouri. I had auditioned for a couple of her films, actually, one of them that ended up not getting made: The Little Mermaid. I got a call back and I drove all the way from Missouri to Los Angeles, which is about a 25-hour drive. Fred Rouse [her casting director who also works with her father Francis Ford Coppola] asked me to do a table read for Francis Ford Coppola's movie Megalopolis. The Coppolas were always coming back in a sort of kismet way. I think she saw me in [the TV series] Mare of Easttown. And she liked my performance in that. I was working with Kirsten Dunst at the time [on Alex Garland's Civil War], who is a longtime friend and muse of Sofia Coppola's. And I think she put in a good word for me while we were working together. And then I got a call that she wanted to be with me in New York. We had a meeting over some coffee.
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