Previously there was PriscillaCailee Spaeny revealed that her first collaboration with Sofia Coppola was a later discarded version of The little mermaid.
“My very first call back was via Sofia,” Alien: Romulus Stern told Rich“It was for (Coppola’s) The Little Mermaid(that) ultimately didn’t get made. I sent this weird self-tape of me playing a mermaid with no dialogue.”
In true Coppola fashion, Spaeny said it was “very strange and avant-garde.”
In 2017, Spaeny and Coppola crossed paths again when the actress was cast in The Seduceda historical drama with Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell and Elle Fanning.
“It didn’t work out in the end,” Spaeny recalls. “I was devastated because Sofia is the director I focused on as a young teenager, especially living in the Bible Belt. There’s something so liberating about her work and something that wasn’t really talked about among young women in the area I grew up in. She took young girls seriously. That really spoke to me on a personal level.”
But thanks to her two previous experiences, Spaeny made her breakthrough with the role of Priscilla Presley in the 2023 film of the same name, in which Jacob Elordi plays the role of Elvis Presley.
“Then I got a call that (Coppola) wanted to meet me in New York. We had coffee, and then she pulled out her iPad and started showing me photos of Priscilla Presley,” Spaeny said.
Spaeny, who will appear in the second season of Netflix’s beeffilmed Civil War When she got the call, she was working with Dunst, who frequently worked with Coppola.
“I think (Dunst) was watching me to see what she thought of me,” she said. “I don’t know what she said to Sofia, but she said something, but then, at the end of filming Civil WarI found out that I had gotten the role of Priscilla.”
In fact, Dunst gave her some tips on how to adjust to a Coppola-led set after seeing the cruel, dystopian world of Civil War: “We had just shot this incredibly intense war movie with tons of explosions. It was very disorienting and Kirsten said, ‘(Priscilla) is going to be the opposite. It’s just so relaxed and laid back and you’re just going to have the best time and Sofia is going to play music and you’re going to be sad in the bath.’ And all of those things fit!”
In 2014, Coppola developed a live-actionLittle Mermaid with Universal and Working Title, with the project based on the “much darker” original fairy tale, as opposed to the light-hearted Disney version. The picture fell apart when a studio executive questioned how the film would be received by older men: “Yeah, there was (a turning point). I was in a boardroom and a development guy said, ‘What’s going to appeal to the 35-year-old man in the audience?'” Coppola later said. “And I just didn’t know what to say. I just wasn’t in my element.”
