The 12 best onscreen Elvis actors, ranked

When Sofia Coppola’s new biopic Priscilla opens in theaters on November 3, Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, The Kissing Booth) will be joining an elite club of actors who have had the privilege of playing Elvis Presley on screen. The numerous fictional depictions of The King run the gamut in terms of authenticity, believability, and entertainment value. Which isn’t surprising, considering that the pitfalls of playing the charismatic superstar are perhaps more pronounced than for any other music icon. Does an actor attempt to re-create Presley’s electric hip-swiveling and powerhouse vocals? Or does he reinvent, seeking truth in essence rather than literal accuracy? We’ve seen varying degrees of success with these different approaches.

Last year, Austin Butler’s version of the icon in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis earned him an Oscar nomination. Now that he’s left the building, a new contender has arrived to claim the throne. We’ve taken the occasion to rank the best Elvis portrayals, from big-screen films to TV movies and miniseries to the flimsiest of Vegas impersonators. Read on to see where Elordi ranks among screen legends like Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, and yes, even Harvey Keitel.

12. David Keith, Heartbreak Hotel (1988)

Roger Ebert rightly called this 1988 Chris Columbus (yes, that Chris Columbus) movie, “awesomely bad, contrived, awkward and filled with unintentional laughs.” Then again, any film that imagines a circa 1972 Elvis as some avuncular figure who would help a high schooler whose mother is a huge fan and could use an emotional boost while recovering from an accident deserves such scorn. And David Keith, playing The King, does not come away unscathed. There’s the fact that he looks nothing like The King (a curse that afflicts many an Elvis casting). But mostly it’s that Keith is called to play an aggressively sanitized Elvis (he’s actually compared to “Ivory Soap suds”), given lines like “I didn’t do that for you. I did that for rock and roll.” Having been handed a wholly contradictory version of the “Heartbreak Hotel” singer, any and all choices Keith was forced to make end up doing actor and character alike a disservice. [Manuel Betancourt]