When Sofia Coppola went looking for someone to play Priscilla Presley in one of 2023’s most acclaimed biopics, she found an actress who had, in many ways, been preparing for the role her entire life without even knowing it.
Not through acting workshops or film school. Through her mother. Reja Spaeny, a woman who never sought fame or Hollywood recognition, spent years filling her Springfield, Missouri home with Elvis Presley memorabilia, playing his music on repeat, and driving her family to his mansion in Tennessee as a vacation destination.
By the time Cailee Spaeny walked onto the set of Priscilla, the Presley world was not foreign territory. It was practically her childhood.
This is the story of how one mother’s deep personal passion became the quiet, unlikely foundation of her daughter’s most defining performance.
Reja Spaeny’s Deep Elvis Presley Fandom
Most parents pass things down to their children without realising it. A love of cooking. A sense of humor. A stubborn streak. Reja Spaeny passed down Elvis Presley.
Cailee has spoken openly about growing up in a household where Elvis was a constant presence. “Growing up, there always seemed to be an Elvis Greatest Hits CD playing in the house and in the car,” she has said. For a family that spent a lot of time on long road trips between Missouri and California chasing auditions, that means hours upon hours of Elvis filling the car, soaking into the memory of a young girl who would one day be asked to inhabit his world entirely.
This was not a passing interest or a casual nostalgia on Reja’s part. Cailee has recalled that her mother’s Elvis Presley fandom filled their home with music and memorabilia, and in interviews, she described it as what seemed like a shrine in their home. That word, shrine, carries weight. This was devotion. The kind that shapes an atmosphere and becomes part of a child’s earliest emotional vocabulary.
Spaeny and her family were raised on Elvis, and while she knew the iconic moments and famous photographs, she admitted she did not fully know Priscilla’s own story. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Her mother gave her the world around Elvis. The film asked her to find the woman living inside it.
A Home Filled with Elvis Memorabilia
Walk into the Spaeny home in Springfield, and you would immediately know where the family’s loyalties lay.
Reja collected Elvis memorabilia and built what seemed like a shrine to the legendary rock-and-roll singer. In a large, nine-child Southern Baptist household in the American Midwest, that kind of dedicated fan culture stands out. It signals something about the person at the centre of it. Reja was not simply a fan. She was a keeper of a cultural legacy, someone who felt strongly enough about an artist to make him a physical presence in the home where her children grew up.
For Cailee specifically, this environment did something quietly profound. It embedded the emotional texture of the Presley world into her imagination years before any script existed. Reja’s collection of memorabilia influenced the family’s cultural environment and instilled a love for storytelling and celebrity culture in her daughter from a young age.
When Cailee eventually sat across from Priscilla Presley herself to prepare for the role, she was not approaching a stranger’s life. She was approaching something she had grown up feeling adjacent to, even if she had never fully understood Priscilla’s own side of it.
Family Road Trips to Graceland
The memorabilia at home was one thing. But the Spaeny family did not just collect Elvis. They went to him.
The family took a road trip to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit the famed Presley family estate, Graceland. Spaeny has a vivid memory of her father walking around the city with tears in his eyes, singing Elvis’s 1968 song “If I Can Dream.”
That image has stayed with Cailee long enough for her to share it in interviews years later. A father, moved to tears, at a musician’s home. A daughter watching him, taking it in, storing it somewhere deep. That is the kind of formative emotional experience that a performer draws from without always being able to name it.
Cailee has described it simply: “We grew up going to Graceland for vacations.” Not once. Vacations. Plural. Graceland was not a bucket-list trip for the Spaeny family. It was a destination they returned to, a place that held meaning for them in the way that family traditions do.
It is worth pausing on what that actually means for the actress who would later be asked to portray the woman who lived inside that mansion. Cailee Spaeny had walked those halls as a child. She had felt the weight of the place. When the film required her to convey what it felt like to be a teenage girl installed in Graceland by the most famous man alive, she was not imagining it from scratch.
How That Elvis Exposure Prepared Cailee for the Role
When Kirsten Dunst recommended Cailee to director Sofia Coppola for Priscilla, she was vouching for a talent she had witnessed firsthand. Coppola, who had spent time looking for exactly the right actress for a role that required playing a character from age 14 to her late twenties, listened.
It turned out to be a natural part for Spaeny, whose mother collected Elvis Presley memorabilia and whose family visited Graceland when she was growing up. Coppola herself did not need to explain the Presley world to her lead actress. That groundwork had already been laid in a living room in Springfield, Missouri, years earlier.
But there was another layer of preparation that went beyond music and memorabilia. Cailee has drawn a direct parallel between her own life and Priscilla’s, noting that they were the same age when they each had a fierce conviction about the direction of their lives. “Like Priscilla’s family, my family made incredible sacrifices to support that decision,” she has said. “And you’re not only having to get it right for yourself, but also make sure that you don’t let them down.”
That emotional parallel performed its core. Cailee did not just research Priscilla intellectually. She understood her in her bones. Both were teenage girls who refused to be talked out of what they wanted, and both had families who, against reasonable odds, said yes.
Cailee has spoken about the preparation process directly: “It was very daunting, but I was very lucky to spend some time with Priscilla, and she was very generous. When you’re playing someone so well-known, that support makes all the difference.” That four-hour meeting with the real Priscilla Presley gave her details no book could have. But the emotional groundwork? That came from home.
Reja’s Quote on Her Daughter’s Hollywood Recognition
Reja Spaeny has never been the kind of parent who courts press attention or leverages her daughter’s fame for personal visibility. She operates quietly, and when she does speak, she speaks with the kind of simplicity that tends to cut straight through.
When Cailee began receiving recognition in Hollywood, Reja responded with joy and expressed her pride, describing it as “a pretty big deal for a little girl from Springfield.”
That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work. It is not the language of a Hollywood stage parent or a manager talking about returns on investment. It is the voice of a mother from Missouri who helped pack the car and shared hotel rooms for years, and who is watching her daughter stand at the Venice Film Festival clutching a best actress award while standing next to the real Priscilla Presley.
A pretty big deal for a little girl from Springfield. It is, perhaps, the most honest and moving thing anyone has said about Cailee Spaeny’s rise.
The Unseen Influence Behind Cailee’s Biggest Role
The story of how Priscilla came together is often told through the names that appear on its credits. Sofia Coppola. Jacob Elordi. Kirsten Dunst. A24. But the less-told version of that story has its beginning in a house in Springfield, Missouri, where a mother covered the walls with Elvis photographs and pressed play on the same greatest hits album year after year.
At the film’s Venice premiere, as the lights came up, Priscilla Presley turned to Cailee and said: “That was a great performance. I watched my life through you.”
That validation, from the woman whose life Cailee had just spent months inhabiting, is the measure of everything. And it would not have been possible without a mother who, long before any casting conversation happened, decided that Elvis Presley was worth loving loudly and sharing freely with her children.
Reja Spaeny never set foot on a film set. Her name will not appear in the awards conversation. But the cultural world she built inside her home, the music she played, the memorabilia she collected, the trips she made to Graceland, are embedded in one of the most praised performances of 2023. That is the kind of influence that does not show up in credits but shapes everything anyway.
