By Wearer of extremely good tailoring Harry Styles and Baby Driver's Ansel Elgort are reportedly in the frame to play Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming biopic of The King.
According to The Hollywood Reporter they were among the five actors who've auditioned for the part, along with Whiplash's Miles Teller, Austin Butler, who will soon be in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who also played noted Elvis obsessive John Lennon in Nowhere Boy.
Styles made his film debut in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk in 2017, but he's not been back on screen in a dramatic role since. Ansel Elgort, meanwhile, is currently shooting Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake. Tom Hanks is already on board as Elvis' legendarily controlling manager Colonel Tom Parker, who was neither a real colonel nor called 'Tom Parker', having been born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, the Netherlands.
We don't know yet who's in pole position to play The King, but if you're in the mood, a wander through the Wikipedia list of honorific titles within music is a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Obviously you know Elvis was The King, that James Brown was the Godfather of Soul and that in the early 90s Michael Jackson started asking to be known by the title Elizabeth Taylor thought up for him, the King of Pop, Rock and Soul.
But it's extremely heartening to learn that Justin Timberlake was briefly 'the President of Pop', that Katy Perry was styled as 'the female MJ' (a name that's perhaps wisely long since been dropped), and that Hungarian singer Jimmy Zàmbò also calls himself The King. That's some serious self-belief.
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