Elvis

TORONTO — Welcome to a special daily edition of the Envelope at TIFF, a newsletter collecting the latest developments out of Canada’s annual film showcase. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Our photo gallery’s latest includes Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater and more.

But click through for our video interviews, including Mark Olsen’s sit-down with Sydney Sweeney and the crew of her boxing movie “Christy,” which required a total transformation.

Sydney Sweeney in “Christy,” a portrait of boxing champ Christy Martin, having its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

(Allie Fredericks / TIFF)

Here’s a taste of their exchange:

Sydney, people are already really talking about the physical transformation you make in the movie, the training that you did. What was it about the role that made it seem like you wanted to make that kind of commitment?

Sydney Sweeney: I mean, I couldn’t let Christy down, and I also love transforming for characters. That’s the whole reason of being an actor, is to be something different from yourself and to challenge ourselves.

So I had like two months of training. I built gyms in my house and I had a boxing trainer, I had a weight trainer, I had a nutritionist and would work out and train every single day.

And it was amazing. I loved it. Being able to completely lose yourself for somebody else and then have that person there next to your side. It was transformative.

Katy O’Brian, co-star: It was exhausting watching her do it.

Ben Foster, co-star: And in tribute to Syd, we’d shoot a 12-hour day that was dense, we’ll say, that would be a gentle word. She would then go train and choreograph the fights that she would do back-to-back after, one after another.

Sweeney: I’d be put in the middle of a ring and I’d have like nine girls and they would just drill me with all the different fights, one after the other for like two hours after we would wrap.

Because I really wanted the choreography to match the exact fights that she had in real life. So we would watch all the footage from her fights and memorize all the combinations and then implement those into the fight.

So everything you see were her actual fights. And so I’d wrap, I would do that for two hours, and then I would weight train.

David, there is something very unflinching about the movie. Why was it that you wanted to tell Christy’s story in a way that wasn’t afraid to explore these really dark and disturbing moments in her life?

David Michôd, director: In a way, the dark and disturbing was what made me want to make the movie. I had a clear sense that in this really wild and colorful story of a ’90s boxing pioneer was actually, underneath, it was a very important story to tell about how these coercive control relationships function.

And trying to wrap my brain around what keeps them functioning over, in this case, 20 years. And I knew that where Christy’s story went, it was harrowing.

And what the challenge for me then as a filmmaker was just to go, how do I do this being very conscious of not wanting to step into a world of representations of violence against women and all that kind of stuff, but not shying away from the horror that is very much there and is very palpable.

I could see a big sprawling movie that would start almost as a kind of conventional underdog pioneering sports movie and then morph into something that was deeply moving and important.

Sydney, Ben, what was it like for the two of you performing some of those darker scenes in the film and how did you keep some sense of humanity between the two of you?

Sweeney: There were so many conversations around a lot of those moments, and both Ben and I, we don’t like to rehearse and we kind of just want to feel it. And I think we both became very connected to who we were portraying and —

Foster: Listening.

Sweeney: We just listened

Foster: And Dave created a space where we could do that. And we would block it, we did a lot of talk privately, and then we would come in and jam and nudge. But the truth is Dave is quality control and would fine-tune moments.

The day’s buzziest premieres

‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’

Elvis Presley performing live, as seen in Baz Luhrmann’s archival concert movie “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.”

(TIFF)

How deep did Baz Lurhmann go researching his 2022 movie “Elvis”? Forty stories. That’s the depth of the Kansas salt mine where Warner Bros. had stored 59 hours of unseen recordings from Elvis Presley’s seven-year stint in Las Vegas.

Lurhmann studied it for his Oscar-nominated biopic, which mourned Presley as an artist in a cage and wondered who the curious, music-loving boy from Tupelo might have become if Col. Parker had let him, say, visit an ashram with the Beatles.

This time, the “Moulin Rouge!” director has said that he wants to use found footage to “let Elvis sing and tell his story” — as in, Lurhmann’s own spectacular sensibilities will cede center stage to Presley himself, who can still wow a crowd even during a late-career moment when his own fans feared he had more jumpsuits than ambition.

I’ll definitely be at the premiere to pay my respects to the King. — Amy Nicholson

‘Hamnet’

Jessie Buckley, center, in director Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

You’re going to be hearing a lot of Oscar buzz in the coming months about various movies, along with people insisting that — seriously — this is the one you need to see. “Hamnet” is, far and away, that film, for three specific reasons.

First, Paul Mescal has now done three masterful turns, between this, “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers” confirming what a truly special talent he is. Mescal and the “Hamnet” crew came through our TIFF studio.

Clockwise from right: Paul Mescal, Noah Jupe, Jacobi Jupe, director Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley and Emily Watson, photographed in the Los Angeles Times Studios at RBC House during the Toronto International Film Festival.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Second, I needed director Chloé Zhao to rebound after the mess that was “Eternals” to the confidence she displayed on “Nomadland” — and she’s done exactly that. Read our Telluride interview with her.

Finally, Jessie Buckley has uncorked one of the year’s most impressive turns: a grief-stricken plunge that elevates her to the level of Casey Affleck in “Manchester by the Sea.” Do not be surprised if, like Affleck, she goes all the way. — Joshua Rothkopf

Tragedy and comedy make freaky bedfellows in “Oedipus the King, Mama!” This latest romp from Troubadour Theater Company turns the Getty Villa’s annual outdoor theater production into a Freudian carnival of psychosexual madness.

In “Lizastrata,” the troupe’s 2021 Getty Villa production, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” the old political comedy in which women declare a sex strike to stop a ruinous war, and that singular showbiz sensation, Liza Minnelli, were merrily united in a lampoon with Bob Fosse flourishes. Here, Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” and Elvis, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, are brought together for an equally madcap if less artfully composed mashup.

The Elvis that storms into this ancient land known as Malibu is long past his prime. As impersonated by Matt Walker, the company’s director and comic frontman, he makes the late-career Las Vegas singer look like a spring chicken. Wearing a white jumpsuit adorned with rhinestones and a wig that looks as if some woodland creature had nested on his head, Walker’s Elvis has a bowlegged gait that suggests either a cumbersome protuberance or the early stages of rigor mortis.

There’s a younger version of the character, played by Steven Booth in a cartoon muscle suit and a tunic that makes it easy to flash the audience. But this exhibitionistic Oedipus is the star of the show’s unnecessary preface, a belabored warmup act that should have been cut in rehearsals.

The show feels overextended, as if 45-minutes of comic material had been inflated to fill out a 90-minute slot. The company’s commedia dell’arte-style shenanigans have a natural elasticity but farcical lunacy snaps when stretched too far.

The references to Southern California are unfailingly funny (this Oedipus claims to have started out as the crown prince of Temecula). But there’s something tired about an Elvis parody. The pompadour gag has lost its cultural shelf life. For the TikTok generation, it might as well be Thomas Jefferson who’s crooning “Hound Dog.”

The music still instantly captivates, even if whole swaths of the audience won’t be familiar with the original songs, impudently rewritten for the occasion. A version of “All Shook Up” is brilliantly deployed just as Oedipus is told the truth of his identity by Teiresias (Mike Sulprizio, outfitted to make the blind prophet look like a rejected member of the “Harry Potter” universe.)

How could any son not be shaken to the core after discovering that he not only killed his father but married his mother and sired his own siblings! That’s a lot to take in, as the cast routinely jokes. But denial buys time for a protagonist who’s too busy acting out his Oedipal fantasies to grapple with difficult realities.

The cast of “Oedipus the King, Mama!” at the Getty Villa.

(Craig Schwartz / J. Paul Getty Trust)

The object of Oedipus’ stunted affection is Jocasta (played by Beth Kennedy in a Priscilla Presley wig and the manner of a Southern ex-showgirl turned cougar). Kennedy not only steals the show but comes close to saving it. The comedy isn’t afraid to go low — poor mixed-up Oedipus isn’t yet fully weaned — but Kennedy’s Jocasta never loses her audacious, sexy-mama vivacity.

Rick Batalla, who plays Creon (pronounced crayon here), Oedipus’ straight-shooting brother-in-law, is another standout, eager to show off his own impish Elvis moves. The musical numbers are more elaborate than karaoke acts, but the volume is contained in deference to the Getty Villa’s neighbors, draining the staging of some of its theatrical power.

Scenically, the costumes of Sharon McGunigle and the puppet and prop design of Matt Scott do the heavy lifting. Walker’s direction has a grab-bag aspect, as if the invitation from the Getty Villa came too late to smoothly integrate all the moving parts.

Walker makes a jokey aside to that effect at the start of “Oedipus the King, Mama!” But no one’s complaining. The Getty Villa survived the fires and it can survive this jovial, if half-baked, Sophoclean circus. Levity is what’s needed now, and the Troubies are still funnier than anything AI could come up with, even if the joke is that ChatGPT had a hand in the script.

Two and a half years before he died, Elvis Presley sat on the floor of a walk-in closet at the Las Vegas Hilton and discussed a project that might have changed the course of his life.

The meeting, as recounted by Presley’s longtime friend Jerry Schilling, put the King of Rock and Roll face to face with Barbra Streisand, who’d come to see Presley perform at the Hilton in March 1975 then sought an audience after the show to float an idea: Would Presley be interested in appearing opposite Streisand in her remake of “A Star Is Born”?

At the time of the duo’s conversation — Schilling says that he, Presley’s pal Joe Esposito and Streisand’s boyfriend Jon Peters squeezed into the closet with the stars in a search for some quiet amid the commotion backstage — it had been six years since Presley had last played a dramatic role onscreen; Streisand’s pitch so tantalized him, according to Schilling, that they ended up talking for more than two hours about the movie.

“We even ordered in some food,” Schilling recalls.

Presley, of course, didn’t get the part famously played by Kris Kristofferson — a casualty, depending on who you ask, of Streisand’s insistence on top billing or of the unreasonable financial demands of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. (In her 2023 memoir, Streisand wonders whether the character of a self-destructive musician was in the end “a little too close to his own life” for Elvis’ comfort.)

Whatever the case, Schilling believes that the disappointment over “A Star Is Born” set Presley on a path of poor decision-making that effectively tanked his career before his tragic death at age 42 on Aug. 16, 1977 — 48 years ago this weekend.

“That was the last time I saw the twinkle in my friend’s eye,” Schilling, 83, says of the sit-down with Streisand.

An intriguing new box set commemorates the King’s final burst of creativity. Released this month in five-CD and two-LP editions, “Sunset Boulevard” collects the music Presley recorded in Los Angeles between 1972 and 1975, including the fruit of one session held just days before the meeting about “A Star Is Born.” These were the studio dates that yielded songs like “Separate Ways,” which Elvis cut amid the crumbling of his marriage to Priscilla Presley, and “Burning Love,” his last Top 10 pop hit, as well as 1975’s “Today” LP, an exemplary showcase of Presley’s latter-day blend of rock, country and blue-eyed soul.

Is yet another repackaging of Presley’s music really something to get excited about? The Elvis industry has never not been alive and well over the half-century since he died; in just the last few years, we’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s splashy big-screen biopic, the latest book from the singer’s biographer Peter Guralnick (this one about Parker) and not one but two documentaries about the so-called ’68 comeback special that heralded Presley’s return to live performance after nearly a decade of film work.

More gloomily, “Sunset Boulevard” arrives as Priscilla Presley — who got her own biopic from director Sofia Coppola in 2023 — is making headlines thanks to an ugly legal battle with two former business partners she brought on to aid in managing the Presley brand. (The feud itself follows the sudden death two years ago of Priscilla and Elvis’ only child, Lisa Marie Presley.)

Yet the new box offers an opportunity to ponder the curious position Elvis found himself in once the glow of the comeback special had faded: a rock and roll pioneer now strangely removed from the culture he did as much as anyone to invent.

“Sunset Boulevard’s” title, which the set shares with Billy Wilder’s iconic 1950 movie, can’t help but evoke the spoiled grandeur of an aging showbiz legend. It also refers to the physical location of RCA Records’ West Coast headquarters at 6363 Sunset Blvd., across the street from Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome. Now the site of the L.A. Film School, the building is where the Rolling Stones recorded “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and Jefferson Airplane made “Surrealistic Pillow” — and where Presley set up in the early ’70s after cutting most of his ’60s movie soundtracks at Radio Recorders near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue.

Jerry Schilling at his home in West Hollywood.

(JSquared Photography / For The Times)

By 1972, rock had long since evolved beyond the crucial influence Elvis exerted at the beginning of his career. Nor was the King particularly dialed into what was happening in music while he was busy in Hollywood.

“We weren’t as exposed as much as I wish we would’ve been to everything going on,” Schilling says on a recent afternoon at his home high in the hills above Sunset Plaza. A core member of Elvis’ fabled Memphis Mafia, Schilling has lived here since 1974, when Elvis bought the place from the TV producer Rick Husky and gifted it to Schilling for his years of loyal friend-ployment.

“When you’re doing movies, you’re up at 7 in the morning and you’re in makeup by 8,” Schilling continues. “You work all day and you come home — you’re not necessarily putting on the latest records.”

More than the growling rock lothario of Presley’s early days — to say nothing of the shaggy psychedelic searchers who emerged in his wake — what the RCA material emphasizes is how expressive a ballad singer Elvis had become in middle age. Schilling says the singer’s romantic troubles drew him to slower, moodier songs like “Separate Ways,” “Always on My Mind” and Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” the last of which he delivers in a voice that seems to tremble with regret. (Presley had to be cajoled into singing the uptempo “Burning Love,” according to Schilling, who notes with a laugh that “when it became a hit, he loved it.”)

But in the deep soulfulness of this music you’re also hearing the rapport between Presley and the members of his live band, with whom he recorded at RCA instead of using the session players who’d backed him in the ’60s. Led by guitarist James Burton, the TCB Band — that’s Taking Care of Business — was assembled ahead of Elvis’ first engagement at Las Vegas’ International Hotel, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton; indeed, one of “Sunset Boulevard’s” more fascinating features is the hours of rehearsal tape documenting Presley’s preparation in L.A. for the Vegas shows that began in 1969.

The sound quality is murky and the performances fairly wobbly, as in a take on “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” where Elvis can’t quite seem to decide on a key. Yet it’s a thrill to listen in as the musicians find their groove — a kind of earthy, slow-rolling country-gospel R&B — in an array of far-flung tunes including “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” even the Pointer Sisters’ “Fairytale.”

The RCA Records building on Sunset Boulevard in an undated photo.

(RCA Records)

In one rehearsal recorded Aug. 16, 1974, Elvis cues his band to play the Ewan MacColl ballad made famous by Roberta Flack: “‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Friggin’ Face,’” he calls out as we hear the players warming up. Then they all lock in for a closely harmonized rendition of the song so pretty there’s something almost spooky about it.

Sitting next to the balcony he was standing on when he got the phone call alerting him to the news of Presley’s death, Schilling takes clear pleasure in spinning well-practiced yarns about his years with Elvis: the time John Lennon told him to tell Presley that he grew out his sideburns in an attempt to look like the King, for instance, or the audition where Elvis took a flier on a relatively unknown drummer named Ronnie Tutt who ended up powering the TCB Band.

He’s more halting when he talks about the end of his friend’s life and about what he sees as the lack of a serious artistic challenge that might have sharpened Elvis’ focus. Staying on in Vegas a bit too long, making so-so records in a home studio set up at Graceland — these weren’t enough to buoy the man he calls a genius. Does Schilling know if Presley saw “A Star Is Born” when it came out at the end of 1976?

He considers the question for a good 10 seconds. “I don’t know,” he finally says. He started tour managing the Beach Boys that year and was spending less time with Presley. “He never mentioned it to me. I wish I knew. There’s probably nobody alive now who could say.”

For about two months when she was a kid, Jessie Murph wanted to go to Harvard.

“I watched ‘Legally Blonde,’ and I was like, ‘This is lit,’” the 20-year-old singer and songwriter says of the Reese Witherspoon law-school comedy that came out three years before she was born. But wait: Growing up in small-town Alabama, Murph was a talented and dedicated cheerleader. Does Harvard even have cheerleaders?

“They probably do,” she says, tilting her head as she considers the question. “I don’t know if it’s like the main thing, though. It’s true you don’t really hear about it. They have all the expensive sports: lacrosse, polo, horse riding.” She laughs. “Horse riding would be lit too.”

Whatever the case, Murph soon cast aside her Ivy League aspirations — not to mention her devotion to cheer, though that’s come back more recently — and refocused on her first love of music. Now, instead of preparing for sophomore year, she’s just released her second major-label album, “Sex Hysteria,” which includes the top 20 pop hit “Blue Strips” and which — true to the LP’s title — has set off a minor internet controversy with the racy music video for her song “1965.”

An Amy Winehouse-ish retro-soul number with a ringing malt-shop piano lick, “1965” is about longing for romance the way they did it in the old days: “We’d go to diners and movies and such,” Murph sings in her scratchy Southern drawl, “We’d just hold hands and I’d love every touch.” Elsewhere in the song, the nostalgia darkens as Murph acknowledges that “I might get a little slap-slap” from her man and that “I would be 20, and it’d be acceptable for you to be 40.” (“That is f— up, I know,” she adds of the age gap.)

The song’s NSFW video goes even further, with traces of pornography and suggestions of domestic violence that have invited criticism that Murph is advocating (or at least aestheticizing) a kind of tradwife oppression at a precarious moment for women’s rights. Murph addressed the blowback in a video on TikTok, where she has 11 million followers, writing, “This entire song is satire r yall stupid” — proof, perhaps, that her point didn’t quite land as she’d hoped.

Yet this week, “Sex Hysteria” debuted on Billboard’s album chart at No. 8, not long after Lana Del Rey — a key influence on Murph with a long history of online outrage — posted a video of herself pole dancing to “Blue Strips,” whose title refers to the security marking on a $100 bill that might be tossed at an exotic dancer. All the attention has combined to put Murph in the conversation for a best new artist nod at February’s Grammy Awards.

“Writing this album, I was in the studio every day for like six months straight,” she says on a recent afternoon near Venice Beach. “Didn’t go out, didn’t do anything — was just grinding.” We’re talking at the end of a long day of promo for “Sex Hysteria”; she’s wearing jeans and a Hysteric Glamour T-shirt, her inky-black hair hanging loose around her face. “But it’s so cool because you go in there with nothing and you make something out of thin air,” she says. “Then you get to listen to it, and it’s therapeutic for what you’re feeling.”

Though it opens with a track in which she attributes her becoming a songwriter to “my father and the f— up s— he did,” “Sex Hysteria” is a more playful record than last year’s “That Ain’t No Man That’s the Devil,” which Murph says exorcised “a lot of anger and hurt that I needed to get out, even just for myself, before I could move on to the next phase.” (A representative lyric from “Dirty”: “I woke up this morning kind of mad / Flipped the switch, I had the urge to beat your ass.”)

Here, in contrast, she’s singing about her interest in “whips and chains” in the sock-hoppy “Touch Me Like a Gangster” and bragging about the Malibu mansion she just bought in “Blue Strips” — a mansion, she clarifies, she does not actually own.

“Not yet,” she adds. “That line was just the first thing that came out of my mouth when I was writing the song. It feels so glittery, the thought of living in Malibu. It’s always been something I’ve wanted to do.” What shaped her ideas about the storied coastal enclave as a child in the Deep South? “I’m a really big fan of ‘Property Brothers’ — I’m sure I saw it on there.”

Murph moved to L.A. about a year and a half ago from Nashville, where she established a foothold in the music industry with collaborations like “Wild Ones,” a duet with Jelly Roll that has more than 300 million streams on Spotify, and “High Road,” a No. 1 country-radio hit by her and Koe Wetzel that led to a nomination for new female artist of the year at May’s ACM Awards.

“Sex Hysteria” dials down the explicit country trappings in favor of thumping bass lines and woozy trap beats; her guests on the album are Gucci Mane and Lil Baby. Yet the album demonstrates a certain stylistic blurriness that’s comes to define country music no less than any other genre in the streaming era.

“Whether it’s country or pop or whatever, I think Jessie Murph is just Jessie Murph,” says Bailey Zimmerman, the Nashville up-and-comer who teamed with Murph last year for the rootsy “Someone in This Room” and whose own music shares a casually hybridized quality with Murph’s. “It may not sound country, but what she’s talking about usually is.”

Like many in her generation, Murph found her voice posting covers of popular songs online. The oldest video on her YouTube is titled “11 year old sings titanium” and, sure enough, shows a young Murph squinting into the camera as she performs Sia and David Guetta’s 2011 stadium-rave jam. At 16, having built a following on Instagram and TikTok while in high school in Athens, Ala., she signed to Columbia Records and started releasing singles; by 2023 she’d dropped a mixtape called “Drowning” and recorded songs with Diplo and Maren Morris.

Jessie Murph

(Annie Noelker / For The Times)

For “Sex Hysteria,” she drew inspiration from Patsy Cline, Wanda Jackson and both Presleys — Elvis and Priscilla. Murph says her mother told her that when Jessie was 3, she came into the kitchen and announced that she’d been Elvis in a past life. Has Jessie been to Graceland?

“No, but my mom went there when she was pregnant with me,” she says, widening her kohl-rimmed eyes.

She titled the album in reference to the dismissive way women were described as “hysterical” in the 1950s and ’60s — “women who were depressed or anxious or just feeling normal emotions,” she says. Does she think women are more free to express themselves half a century later?

“I definitely feel free if I’m feeling some type of way — obviously I’m saying it in songs and not holding anything back. But I think everyone’s experience is very different. I’m sitting in a different spot than somebody three doors down is, you know? And different countries and different political settings — I’m sure it’s something that’s a problem in places.”

To a degree, the backlash to Murph’s “1965” has overlapped with the criticism Sabrina Carpenter drew when she revealed the cover of her upcoming “Man’s Best Friend” album, which depicts Carpenter kneeling before a man who’s pulling her hair.

“The weirdest part about it is that it’s a lot of women who are hating,” Murph says. “But I think some people are weirded out by my age. A lot of people met me when I was 16 or 17 and a much different person — which, thank God I’m a different person.” She sighs. “I don’t know. When people find you at a certain age, it’s like you need to be frozen in time. Let me live.”

This week, Murph launched a world tour behind “Sex Hysteria” that she previewed with a buzzy performance at April’s Coachella festival in which she brought some of her old cheerleading moves into the choreography she’s emphasizing for the first time. (She’ll circle back to Southern California for a Sept. 27 stop at the Shrine Expo Hall.)

“Certain things come naturally to me and certain things don’t,” she says. “The dance stuff is one of the things I’m grilling myself on.”

Another of her goals this year: spending less time on social media. “That s— is terrible for your mental health,” she says even as she admits that YouTube and TikTok have been crucial to her ascent. “I’m on World War III TikTok right now, where they’re talking about World War III. And I just keep scrolling, because now I’m nervous about World War III.

“I think it’s scary how young kids are getting phones,” she adds. “That YouTube video you brought up — I could have posted something crazy at that age, right? Even being 16 and having TikTok — I look back at some of the things I posted, and I’m like, Why would you post that, bro?”

Since opening at London Excel last Friday, Layered Reality’s Elvis Experience show has been torn to shreds by punters, who have complained about the visual effects and the cost of tickets

Milo Boyd is a Digital Travel reporter who covers aviation news, the environment, the cruise industry and much else including travel tips, bargain holiday suggestions and inspirational global trips.

“It makes me feel sick.” Not the most glowing of reviews from Ann, a pensioner who opted to leave the Elvis Evolution experience as soon as the mind-bending, sound-warping, completely Elvis-free first half had finished.

Since opening at London Excel last Friday, the show has been torn to shreds by punters like Ann, who had been expecting to see a hologram of the King, only to settle for a selfie with a cardboard cutout. One pensioner was so irate at the steep ticket price he was dragged from the venue after shouting ‘b****cks’ over the live finale.

A tough opening week then for Layered Reality, a London-based events company that combines “the latest in performance technology with live actors and feature quality sets” to produce “the future of entertainment”, or so its website says at least.

When I visited Elvis Evolution on the grey Wednesday afternoon after its opening, I was taken on a “unique immersive” ride into the world of Elvis.

It was just more the parts when he was stuck in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, blasting his mind apart with a diet of nightly shows, hamburgers and Quaaludes, than the bit when he was hot and good at performing.

READ MORE: Baffled Elvis fans dub ’embarrassing’ event the ‘new Willy Wonka experience’

It begins in a 50s-style diner-come-holding pen, where guests are invited to arrive early to enjoy a £10 King and Tonic or a Paramount Pretzel.

“They’ve run out of ice cream, so the Pepsi Floats are off,” Cambridge man Carl told me. He’d had to schlep over the Thames on the IFS Cloud Cable Car from Greenwich after discovering the official car park was closed.

Having had a good moan about the prices as we queued for the first of about ten times that afternoon, we shuffled into the first scene – a recreation of Elvis’s dressing room – and then around it for about 20 minutes. A generous timeslot, given the room was about as faithful a creation of the 50s as the (admittedly incredible) OK Diner on the A1.

And then the lights dim and the conceit begins. A washed-up Elvis is refusing to leave his dressing room and hit the stage for his iconic 1968 NBC Comeback Special. A distressed show manager tells us not to worry, the King will be out soon, and that security guards are on site both for our and the staff’s safety. A little on the nose, given the pensioner dragging that took place just days ago.

Shockingly, the stage manager is wrong. Elvis doesn’t actually appear for the entire duration of the show, aside from in short projected clips of old performances, briefly recreated as an uncanny AI figurine and, at one weird point, as a comic book superhero.

After tempting punters with a hologram Presley just like ABBA Voyage down the road, Layered Reality made the “creative decision not to mimic Elvis’s performances” with the tech. Or hire one of the tens of thousands of impersonators who would’ve probably done a great job. Elvis has not just left the building, he was never in it.

Instead, we get a supporting cast of four actors who whisk us out of the NBC studio to Elvis’ childhood and then on a whirlwind tour back to the moment the King reclaimed his crown.

“I couldn’t hear a bloody thing,” one man told me before following after Ann at halftime and making for the DLR. The sound is admittedly warped and poorly mixed, with the head mics dropping in and out, making the story very hard to follow. “What the hell is going on!?” Catherine, Carl’s wife, asked me as she slurps on a Blue Suede cocktail.

As someone who has served as an elf in the early years of Lapland UK, I know how difficult it is to keep grinning while guiding ripped-off feeling families to the right Father Christmas’ cabin. Or in this case, performing for a visibly bored crowd of pensioners, some of whom have spent up to £300 on VIP passes that get you three “free” drinks and a seat in the finale performance.

The actors gave it their all and were the best thing about the show. But they were fighting a losing battle. The script is bad, the effects are weird, and the sound is not quite ear-splitting enough to mask their Mississippi via London accents.

We are likely to get more and more of this kind of thing as the film industry continues its contraction and immersive events take over. According to Gensler Research Institute’s 2025 Immersive Entertainment & Culture Industry Report, the global market for immersive entertainment was valued at £98bn – and it’s projected to reach £351bn by 2030.

Elvis Evolution has been likened to the catastrophic Wonka and Bridgerton experiences, but that’s a little unfair. Layered Reality has certainly thrown some cash, time and expertise at the event, it’s just not enough.

The show comes to a climax in a small auditorium where groups of elderly people (who clearly have trouble keeping on their feet but only paid £75 for the cheapest tickets) are ushered into the standing pen, while the VIPs enjoy cinema seats at the back.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, Elvis does not appear here as expected. He is beamed onto a flat screen behind a live band, who are pretending to play. It’s a limp way to finish things off, yet it gets people dancing, clapping and smiling for the first time.

It always seemed to me that Elvis was great in spite of his corny origin story, the cringeworthy PR ops he was pressured into and his vast back catalog of sickly sweet love songs. He was great because of his incredible musical talent, which stayed with him until the very end, when he was still able to summon choirs of angels from his broken, slug-like body.

Layered Reality probably should’ve realised this, cut out most of the bells and whistles, and actually hired an Elvis to sing a few of his tunes.

A spokesperson for the company said: “Elvis Evolution has been praised by Elvis fans and newcomers alike — but it’s not a traditional concert or hologram show. From the outset of development, we made a deliberate decision to explore the most powerful and authentic ways to tell Elvis’ story.

“This major scale production brings together a cast of 28 performers and over 300 skilled professionals across design, production, and visual effects.

“Elvis Evolution is a multisensory experience, where technology plays a powerful supporting role — but the show doesn’t attempt to recreate Elvis’ performances. Instead, it joyfully celebrates the ones he gave us. We’re incredibly proud of what’s been created, and of how it’s reconnecting people with Elvis in new and meaningful ways.”

Elvis Presley’s worn Omega wristwatch, gifted to him by Johnny Cash, sold for $103,700 this week.

Goldin, a leading sports and pop culture memorabilia auction house, sold the engraved timepiece as part of its inaugural music memorabilia auction, which closed Wednesday night. Other high-selling items included a D.A. Millings & Son custom suit worn by John Lennon in 1963 ($102,480), a signed copy of Led Zeppelin’s album “Presence” ($19,520) and George Harrison’s sunglasses ($47,590). Goldin also set a new sale record for a type 1 photo — or photo developed from an original negative within two years of when the picture was taken— of rapper Tupac Shakur, which sold for $10,370, according to the auction house.

Though sports and trading card auctions are Goldin’s “bread and butter,” the company is venturing more into pop culture, said head of revenue Dave Amerman. This transition is documented in Goldin’s Netflix show, “King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch,” which premiered in 2023 and was just renewed for a third season.

“We realized that we get so many music items and we build them into our pop culture sales, we just want to separate it and make its own event out of it,” Amerman told The Times.

Many of the Beatles items belonged to music promoter Chris Agajanian, who’s been building his collection for more than 40 years. Agajanian owns more than 2,000 pieces of Beatles memorabilia and signed letters of provenance for many of the items in the Goldin sale.

The music auction also included more than 500 concert posters graded by the Certified Guaranty Company, the leader in comic book grading. Poster subjects ranged from the Grateful Dead and the Beatles to Sonic Youth and Blink-182.

In 2020, Goldin sold one of the most expensive albums of all time: a copy of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Double Fantasy” that Lennon unwittingly signed for his assassin, Mark David Chapman, just before the Beatle was shot in 1980. It went for $900,000.

Additionally, the auction house holds the record for most expensive toy sold at an auction: a 1979 prototype action figure of “Star Wars” bounty hunter Boba Fett that went for more than $1 million in 2024.

Goldin’s Hollywood Props & Memorabilia auction, featuring Harrison Ford’s “Indiana Jones” whip, a “Star Wars” Stormtrooper prototype helmet and George Reeves’ “Superman” suit, is currently live. The auction closes Aug. 6.