Elvis trailer gives first look at Baz Luhrmann biopic
Austin Butler and Tom Hanks star in the first trailer for the upcoming film.
It's been almost nine years since Baz Luhrmann last released a film, but the Aussie director is set to return in style this year with a movie about rock 'n' roll legend Elvis Presley – and the first trailer has just been released.
The trailer gives fans a first look at Austin Butler as the iconic singer and Tom Hanks as his long-term manager Colonel Tom Parker (complete with an interesting Dutch accent), and it looks like we can expect all the glitz and glamour you'd imagine from a Luhrmann project.
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"There are some who make me out to be the villain of this here story," Parker says at the trailer's opening, before we see various key moments from throughout Presley's career – including his first major performance and his reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Meanwhile, the trailer's soundtrack features a number of Presley's most famous songs, including renditions of his iconic hits Heartbreak Hotel and Unchained Melody.
And of course, the final line we hear in the trailer is a voice saying, "Elvis has left the building." You can check out the trailer in full below.
Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press at a launch event for the trailer earlier this month, Luhrmann detailed that he did not consider the film a biopic in the traditional sense – explaining that it was "a canvas on which to explore America".
"Without in any way invoking that I'm up there with a Shakespeare or someone like that, the great storytellers like Shakespeare didn't really do biographies," he said. "I mean, Shakespeare never really did the biography of King Richard.
"What they did was they took a life, and they used that life as a canvas to explore a larger idea. So I mean, a great biopic is terrific, but something like Amadeus, for example – it's not really about Mozart, it's about jealousy.
"Now, as a young guy, I was an Elvis fan. But I don't know that that fanhood, was in any way the reason that all these years later I wanted to do Elvis. The truth is that in this modern era, the life of Elvis Presley could not be a better canvas on which to explore America in the '50s, the '60s, and the '70s.
"I mean, it's a mythical life that he lived, three great lives put into a short period of time. And what's extraordinary about it, is that that life is culturally at the centre of the '50s, and socially the '60s, and actually the '70s – and it's a great canvas on which to explore America. So that's what drew me in."
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Elvis is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th June 2022. Visit our Movies hub for the latest news and features, or find something to watch tonight with our TV Guide.
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
