“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘I didn’t know Elvis Presley was so conservative,'” says actor Michael Shannon who plays the iconic singer in “Elvis & Nixon,” a new film that dramatizes the true, unlikely meeting in December 1970 between the King and the Republican president.
“Elvis never talked politics with anybody—he didn’t think it was his place to instruct people on politics,” continues Shannon.” But it brings out an interesting trait in Elvis, which is that he was always aware of who he was talking to and he was willing to have whatever conversation the other person wanted to have. He meets this person [Nixon] who is perennially grumpy and coaxes him into having a semi-decent time.”
‘Tricky Dick’ is played by Kevin Spacey. But Spacey is keen to dispel the notion he is drawn to playing corrupt presidents and that his Richard Nixon is similar to Frank Underwood in Netflix’s hit TV drama “House of Cards.”
“Certainly in hindsight, and knowing what happened to Richard Nixon, you can put him in that category,” says Spacey when asked whether he likes playing political sociopaths.
“But what was interesting to me about this Nixon is that he wasn’t saddled with Watergate—he hadn’t even started taping in the White House and wouldn’t for a year and a half. This wasn’t for me exploring a dark, Machiavellian figure. There are elements to his paranoia, the sense that something was f**ked up or wrong and people are screwing up. But Elvis provides Nixon with a conversation that he didn’t expect and that presented for me a different kind of Nixon.”
Presley was granted a sit-down with Nixon in the White House after the singer sought to be an undercover “federal agent at large” to help the President fight the war on drugs. Presley went to the Oval Office with his close friend Jerry Schilling, who serves as one of the film’s executive producers and is played in the movie by Alex Pettyfer.
It seems like Shannon, who is currently acting on Broadway in a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” had a more intense time preparing to play Presley than Spacey did stepping into Nixon’s shoes. “It was scary because I didn’t want to get him wrong,” Shannon said at the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. “I look nothing like him—I don’t think anybody did.
“I just studied him, looked at interviews, read books and listened to his music.” Shannon insists both protagonists are “lovable” and “there’s so much already in the popular culture presenting a mocking caricature of these two people. Life is too short to add to that.”
The meeting between Elvis and President Nixon was captured by a White House photographer, and the picture is now the most requested photo in the U.S. National Archives, but there is no footage documenting their meeting.
No footage will ever exist either of the actors who were originally due to play Elvis and Nixon—Eric Bana and Danny Huston. Bana dropped off the project after having creative disagreements with the film’s original director, Cary Elwes, who was himself replaced by Liza Johnson.
“Eric Bana is probably crying right now,” the film’s co-writer Halana Segal told Heat Street. “I’m sorry he didn’t stick with it, but Michael Shannon is an amazing actor.”
Far from being reluctant to endorse a film that covered the difficult final phase of the singer’s career, the Presley family reveled in the absurdity of the event, the director Johnson said. She said Elvis’s cousin’s favorite scene in the film, which is released by Amazon Studios on Friday, is when Elvis practiced a karate chop in front of the Oval Office mirror: “He appreciated that moment because they did actually used to play a game like that.”
Segal revealed the next film she is writing chronicles what happened when Elvis met the Beatles in LA in 1965, a project on which she will again collaborate with Jerry Schilling.
She said: “The Beatles came to California in 1965, and there has never been a film or documentary about what happened. They saw Elvis was into yoga and studying and he was cooler than they thought. George Harrison realized he needed to express himself more and became a better songwriter. Meeting Elvis changed the Beatles.”