Elvis and Priscilla Presley's Acid Trip Featured in New Biopic

November 15, 2023

Elvis (Jacob Elordi) doses sugar cubes in "Priscilla" and Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as the Presleys.

Little-known fact about Elvis Presley: He once took LSD.

In Sofia Coppola's new film Priscilla, about Presley's wife, there's a psychedelic scene during which the couple consumes sugar cubes dosed with liquid acid. This follows a series of scenes where the Presleys (played by Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi) both pop amphetamine and powerful sleeping pills like Placidyl. Since Priscilla was just a teenager, she didn't know what Elvis was giving her. There's not one scene in the movie where Elvis is not on a drug.

Due to his erratic behavior, Priscilla tells him, "Maybe the pills are too much." Elvis just mutters back about being on "doctors' orders."

"Priscilla freaked out and ran from mirror to mirror screaming that she was ugly, and then she sobbed at Elvis’ feet that he really didn’t love her."

They do the acid in bed with sitar music in the background. It's a pretty innocuous scene.

In 2015, Priscilla explained:

"It was Timothy Leary everything at the time. Elvis had read about LSD in the paper and how our teenagers were on it and he had this curiosity: what’s happening? What are the youth on? So we made an agreement that we would take one tablet, cut it in four, with Jerry Schilling and I believe Larry Geller. We had our security around us because we had no idea what to expect. And it was pretty powerful, it scared all of us. We were thinking: ‘Oh my god, this is not good!’ A total loss of control.”

In a fact check of Priscilla, USA Today interviewed Child Bride: The Untold Story of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley author Suzanne Finstad, who commented about the trip:

"Elvis didn’t take his full dose and never tried LSD again. But it was Priscilla’s reaction to dropping acid that made an impression. According to Geller, Priscilla freaked out and ran from mirror to mirror screaming that she was ugly, and then she sobbed at Elvis’ feet that he really didn’t love her."

Did Elvis Ever Smoke Pot?

One of Presley's girlfriends, Linda Thompson, wrote in her 2016 book, A Little Thing Called Life: On Loving Elvis Presley, Bruce Jenner and Songs in Between, that Presley did smoke pot. She says his doctor recommended he use it to treat glaucoma. One night he asked her to join him.

"It's just relaxing. It will just relax you," Thompson alleges he said.

On that evening in 1974, the King and his Queen for that night were pleasantly stoned. By then, Elvis was already divorced from Priscilla.