The body modification Kurt Russell had to make to become Elvis Presley
Long before he became Snake Plissken, R.J. MacReady, and Jack Burton for the iconic “Master of Horror” John Carpenter, Kurt Russell played a very different character for the director. In the 1979 TV movie Elvis, a young Russell was tasked with inhabiting the body and soul of the “King of Rock n’ Roll”—and he took home an ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or a Special’ Emmy nomination for his trouble. While he nailed Elvis’ mannerisms and personality, one aspect of Elvis’ physicality initially proved problematic for Russell and Carpenter – so they simply applied some glue.
In a 1980 issue of Film Comment, Carpenter revealed that his motivation for taking on the project was twofold. Firstly, he wanted to move beyond horror and stretch his dramatic muscles, but secondly, he was also a huge Elvis fan. He explained, “I wanted to work with actors. I wanted to do a dramatic film. I wanted to do something different. And Elvis was the first thing that came along that I had any feeling for, personally because I did have a feeling for Elvis. I liked him very much and cared about him. So it seemed like a pretty good package when it arrived.”
Russell also had a very personal connection to the King, though. As a ten-year-old child actor, he shared a funny scene with Presley in the 1963 film It Happened at the World’s Fair. It saw the music icon’s crop-dusting pilot paying Russell’s youth to kick him in the shins so he had an excuse to cosy up to the fairground’s attractive nurse.
In 2019, Russell revealed that he was too young to have much conception of who the King was. He chuckled, “I knew Elvis Presley was a name that everybody knew. If I’d seen him, I didn’t know it.” However, when he saw hundreds of women rush the set the first time Presley appeared, jumping up and down on his car in a fevered frenzy, he knew something was up with this guy.
The young Russell still couldn’t quite work out what all the fuss was about, though, so he asked Presley what was going on. The Escape From New York star said, “He’s just this really nice guy. I was just this kid, and I asked him, ‘What’s the deal with all those girls jumping on your car?’ He could see that I was just this innocent kid and responded with, ‘Ah, they get crazy.'”
During the audition process for the 1979 film, Carpenter found himself with two prime candidates for the lead role. The first one was the spitting image of Presley, but Carpenter wasn’t convinced he had any acting chops. The second was Russell, but Carpenter wasn’t familiar with his work. He did know one thing for sure, though—Russell exuded the essence of Presley to a tee. There was just one problem: his ears were too big.
“The biggest problem with his physical appearance were his ears,” grumbled Carpenter in a later interview. “They’re like cab doors sticking out.” Luckily, Carpenter and Russell work in Hollywood, the land of movie magic, so a high-tech solution was soon implemented. Carpenter chuckled, “We had to tape [Russell’s ears] down against him. It was unbelievable.”
Amazingly, the fact that Russell—to quote Carpenter—”has a tin ear” and can’t sing a note was less of a hindrance to the production than his ears. The director revealed, “It was an incredible effort on his part. He became Elvis up there…lip-syncing his heart out, and literally, he was that performer. He became that guy.”
