Bibek Acharya
When Elvis Presley began thrusting his hips and delivering hit after hit, he quickly became a worldwide sensation. His impact on rock and roll was enormous – even if he wasn’t so original himself – and he defined an era with his performances, which many considered too sexually-charged and rebellious.
Despite the controversy he caused throughout his career, Presley was always aiming for more and more success, and he knew that with his position as a popular musician under his belt, he could try to get ahead as a Hollywood star. He’d always been drawn to acting, inspired by classic stars like James Dean, but he didn’t have the same level of talent. That’s not to say he couldn’t act, but Presley was never going to be the next Oscar-winning Hollywood icon.
“I want to become a good actor because you can’t build a whole career on just singing. Look at Frank Sinatra. Until he added acting to singing, he found himself slipping downhill,” he once told Life Magazine. Presley was genuinely passionate about acting, and he went on to appear in 31 feature films, including Jailhouse Rock, G.I Blues, Blue Hawaii, and King Creole.
Presley made his first performance in Love Me Tender, released in 1956, directed by Robert D Webb. The film caused fans to get worked up into a frenzy upon the discovery that Presley’s character, Clint Reno, dies at the end. In fact, there was so much uproar that an alternative ending was released to show that Clint had survived, which certainly emphasised the extent of Presley’s influence.
When Presley began shooting the movie, he crossed paths with an actor who would soon become a star – Dennis Hopper. By this point in his career, the young Hopper had only had small roles in movies like Rebel Without A Cause and Giant, but he was already much more well-acquainted with Hollywood than Presley. In an interview with Seventeen, the Easy Rider actor/director revealed that he had to teach the singer a valuable lesson about acting.
“I remember when Elvis Presley came to Hollywood for his first picture, we met, and he told me he was worried because the script called for him to hit Debra Paget,” he explained. “And he said to me, ‘Man, I never hit a woman before.’ Now, he believed that movie fights were real, and that movie bullets were real, and when I explained that they weren’t, he got very pissed off at me! And Elvis was twenty-one years old at the time! That proved to me the influence of motion pictures”.
Presley was definitely inexperienced when it came to acting, but he was adamant that he was going to be a Hollywood star. Unfortunately for him, he failed to appear in any movies that have genuinely endured as classics, with most of his films acting as mere vehicles for him to star in as Elvis. Meanwhile, Hopper rose to great success, starring in beloved movies like Cool Hand Luke, True Grit, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet.
