No one tells stories about young women quite like writer-director Sofia Coppola. Her latest film, Priscilla—based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me—begins with a teenage Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) stationed with her family at a German Air Force base, where she soon meets Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). As the dashing older musician casts his spell, Coppola follows Priscilla as she morphs from a teenage girl into a wife controlled by her husband and then a mother figuring out who she is as a woman.
The film spans 13 years, with Priscilla’s slow evolution reflected in her costumes, makeup, and hair—the latter perhaps most notably. (Both Presleys were famous for their jet black pompadours.) For both Coppola and Cliona Furey, who headed up the hair department on Priscilla, telling Priscilla’s story through her changing mane was incredibly important. “Sofia inspired it by letting me know that she wanted the hair, makeup, and costumes to show the time [passing] and help tell the story,” Furey says. “That’s where I was going in my mind when I met Sofia. And as [Priscilla’s] life journey arcs, I wanted the hair to arc too.”
Furey, whose prior credits include Nightmare Alley, A Simple Favor, and Crimson Peak, first met Coppola over Zoom to chat about working on the film. She describes the filmmaker’s directing style as deeply creative and collaborative. “She’s such a strong female but with this relaxed, easy, gentle, kind approach,” Furey says. “She was very respectful of me as a head of department and a hair designer. She listened to my ideas. She was approachable, and her relaxed manner and vibe made it nice for the whole crew.”
Furey began her research for the project by reading Priscilla’s script and poring over historical photos, planning to match some of the iconic moments represented in the film. Yet she also wanted to flatter the film’s 25-year-old star: “I felt I captured the essence of Priscilla in a way that looked good for Cailee,” Furey explains. “I showed her the boards and wanted to make sure she was happy with everything.” She took other (informed) creative liberties too, imagining what Priscilla might have looked like before she was photographed by the press, such as when she was still going to school. “I did take a little license but also respected Priscilla’s iconic tastes,” Furey says. “I just tried to keep it very feminine, very classy, because I think that’s Priscilla Presley’s signature look.”
In the end, she assembled five main wigs for Spaeny to wear throughout the film. (Impressively, none of what you see is Spaeny’s actual hair.) With such a tight shoot, unfolding over just a month—and with Spaeny in up to four different wigs a day—Furey had to manipulate several of the wigs to create different styles, whether by teasing them or adding extensions. She also worked closely with costume designer Stacey Battat, makeup artist Jo-Ann MacNeil, and their respective teams to finish each look. “It was helpful to work with Stacey Battat because she’s worked with Sofia many times,” Furey says. “The three of us were joined at the hip, pretty much, because the hair and makeup and costumes just had to coincide with each other or it wouldn’t have worked.”
Together, the trio came up with code names for the different versions of Priscilla that pop up in the film, from the 14-year-old girl who audiences meet at the beginning to the 27-year-old mother at Priscilla’s end. Furey spoke to Vogue about the different wigs and hairstyles that accompanied each phase.
I took a little license with her first wig, which is 14-year-old Priscilla’s real hair. It’s hard to know because all those photos are black and white, but you can tell it was much darker [brunette] and the style was a certain way. So I kept it at a light natural brown color that worked for Cailee and put her in the ponytail, which helped her look 14 years old. I planned that the hair would get longer and the colors would get richer and richer, and then the hair would get bigger and bigger as she evolved into the glammy looks.
She’s still got her natural hair color, but she’s getting glam. She’s trying to look more grown-up. So she’s teasing the hair and playing around with just a little bit of eyeliner. And then her mother gets upset when she sees her at the airport [after returning from her first trip to Graceland]. That was fun to do. Sofia wanted her to look like a wreck for that moment.
She’s doing everything Elvis wants. He’s dictating all her looks. She wants to look more grown-up. He’s hanging around with Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret, and there are all these sirens continually hanging around at Graceland.
Then we go into the reveal in the salon, which is her jet black wig with a bang. I purposely put the bang on that wig because she’s still young; we call that the baby-glam phase. She’s still a teenager and going to high school, but she’s all taken by Elvis and he’s telling her how to wear her hair, makeup, and clothes. But she’s not really grown-up yet. With that wig, I added a long tail for certain scenes when she had the little updo at school.
Her hair is an off-black color now, not jet black. And then the next wig you end up seeing is in the wedding, and it’s longer, there’s no bang, and it is a soft off-black color, but I added a lot of rich, warm tones to that. She’s mature now. She’s majorly glammed with that big, high feminine bouffant.
I called it the “big apex wig,” when she had Lisa Marie at the hospital. It’s a whole top, and it’s a vintage ’50s topper piece. It’s like putting another wig on top of a wig. Cailee didn’t complain at all about it being heavy or anything, but it had to have been. We would laugh at those moments when I’d be gluing her lace on and she’d be holding it.
It almost seems too big. I don’t know if I had the wig as big as Priscilla’s, but somehow Priscilla Presley pulled that off so effortlessly. It’s a fine balance, because I didn’t want it to be cosplay. I did dig my heels in the ground about wanting it to work for Cailee and not just doing an imitation. But I had to respect historical accuracy. I was always checking in with myself, always looking at pictures and looking at Cailee.
We go from that to the family-portrait look, we called it. Now her hair’s longer, but she’s getting out of the bouffant. And from there we go into the ’70s look. For the last wig, in 1972, I purposely chose a color variant from the first wig. There was something about the ’70s look—I shouldn’t speak for her, but I had a feeling that was Cailee’s favorite look. She loved wearing that wig. There was something about it on her, as well as the 14-year-old wig: It just looked so natural on her.
And then with the tanned makeup that Jo-Ann did, with a slight bit of shimmer in there, there was something empowering for Cailee when we put together the costume and the makeup and the hair. Like I said, I did try to respect real reference photos of Priscilla in that time, but I took a little more license because I wanted to show that arc from the beginning. Then, when she leaves [Elvis] at the end of the film, she’s found herself again and she’s doing what she wants with her hair and her look.
