Michael Shannon: Making "Elvis and Nixon" made me an Elvis fan
On a December morning in 1970, Elvis Presley arrived in Washington, D.C., with one goal: to visit the White House and meet with President Richard Nixon. Thanks to some behind-the-scenes maneuvering and one impassioned, handwritten letter, he got his wish -- and the bizarre piece of American history is now immortalized in the film "Elvis and Nixon," featuring Michael Shannon as the "Suspicious Minds" singer and Kevin Spacey as the commander-in-chief.
Shannon spoke to CBS News about getting into the mindset of an icon and why he didn't have to put on any weight to play the King.
Had you heard the story behind this meeting before being approached about the project?
I didn't really know much about it. It was brought to my attention by Holly Wiersma, a producer I worked with on a movie called "Bug" all those years ago. She kept insisting that I play Elvis, and I kept saying, "Holly, it's such a bad idea. I don't know what you're thinking." And then I got the script and I read it.
When somebody says you should play Elvis, do you worry that they're calling you fat?
(laughs) You know, it's funny. At that time, when he went to meet Nixon, he was in probably the best shape of his life. He had just done a huge engagement at the International in Las Vegas. He'd done, like, 100 shows in a row or something, and he was in really good shape. It was before his, um, decline. So no, I wasn't worried. That's the image people usually have of him.He worked his has of, that guy worked hard. And he was deep. That was the thing, people think he's goofy -- largely because of these impersonators that make him seem like he's a goofball, but he was actually ... I mean he had a huge sense humor, but he was a deep.
The photo that came from that meeting really is a striking image.
Apparently it's the most requested photo from the National Archives or something like that, the picture of Elvis and Nixon. Like most things, the deeper I got into it the more intrigued I got by it. I wasn't a huge, diehard Elvis fan. I appreciated Elvis but I didn't really know much about him. But when I got involved with the project and started working on it I rapidly fell madly in love with the man. He really does deserve his place in history. I spent a lot of time with Jerry Schilling, who is one of Elvis' closest friends. We went down to Memphis together, and I think that really sealed the deal, you know? Going to Graceland, Sun Studios -- but also going to Lauderdale Courts, which is the housing project he lived in when he was a teenager in Memphis.
It's still there?
Yeah. You can go to his bedroom -- the apartment, you can go to the apartment. I walked into his bedroom -- it's a little, tiny apartment, the bed barely fits in there. It was just a bed and a window, and I could just picture him standing at that window, looking out at basically nothing and thinking about, What is my life going to be? Who am I going to be?
Elvis and Nixon carry a lot of significance for America in the 1970s.
Those are two guys, Elvis and Nixon, they're public figures and yet they're both intensely shy and private people. And the great thing about that story is it's something we know actually happened and yet there was a period of time when they were the only two people in the room, so nobody actually knows what they said or what they did. So it's a great mystery.
I'd always heard it as Elvis just decided he wanted to go to the White House.
They flew in on a red-eye, they got there I think as the sun was coming up. He wrote a letter -- you can look the letter up online -- on the plane, on American Airlines stationary. They went to the White House and he dropped the letter off. It was a letter for the president saying that he wanted to meet the president, and the aides at the White House managed to pull it off. Specifically Bud Krogh. He was the one. There's a book that Bud put together about it.
You don't see as many of the old tabloid reports about sightings of him anymore, do you?
No, yeah. It's a different time now. People are famous for doing nothing. It's silly.