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    The Best Actors to Play Elvis Onscreen

    In honor of Austin Butler’s performance in the Baz Luhrmann biopic, we ranked 10 of the best — and worst — Presleys to grace the silver screen.Kurt Russell had the hip swivel down cold. Val Kilmer nailed the sincere, soulful voice. And Michael Shannon … well, the credits identified him as Elvis Presley, so that was the character he must have been playing in “Elvis & Nixon,” right?Since the King’s death in 1977, at 42, more than a dozen actors — and one space alien — have portrayed his walk, talk and famous charm in dozens of films and TV shows. Now one more has joined their ranks — Austin Butler, whose on-point hip gyrations are at the heart of Baz Luhrmann’s new “Elvis.”So how does Butler’s sultry, baby-faced King stack up against Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Golden Globe-winning crooner or Harvey Keitel’s over-the-hill rocker? We offer our rankings. 1979Kurt Russell, ‘Elvis’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸The perfectly coifed pouf, the raw, emotive voice, the frenzied hip thrusts, the gleaming, skintight rhinestone jumpsuit … blink, and you could easily believe, thanks to this near-flawless portrayal in a 1979 TV movie, that Kurt Russell is Elvis. Sure, Russell doesn’t actually sing — that was all the country artist Ronnie McDowell — but that speaking voice is spot-on. Buy it on Amazon.2005Jonathan Rhys Meyers, ‘Elvis: The Miniseries’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸The two-part show, which tackles Presley’s rise from high school in Mississippi to international superstardom, is a showcase for Rhys Meyers’s heart-pounding leg pumps (with memorable supporting turns from Randy Quaid as Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, and Rose McGowan as the actress Ann-Margret, with whom Presley was rumored to have had an affair). Like Russell, Rhys Meyers doesn’t do his own singing, but he lip-syncs flawlessly to an even better option: the real thing. (This was the first biopic that the Presley estate allowed to use the master recordings.)Rent it on DVD.com.2005Tyler Hilton, ‘Walk the Line’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸Hilton pops up in four scenes of this Johnny Cash biopic as a young Elvis, opposite a young Joaquin Phoenix as Cash. It was one of Hilton’s first forays into acting — he considered himself more of a musician at the time — but he nails Presley’s slurred vocal style and the deeply felt conviction of his singing.Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1993Val Kilmer, ‘True Romance’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸This romantic crime drama written by Quentin Tarantino centers not on the King, but on an Elvis fanatic (Christian Slater) and his new wife on the run from mobsters. But Kilmer’s apparition of Elvis, complete with gold lamé suit, might just be the most memorable part. (That’s saying something in a film that also featured Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and a young Brad Pitt.) Kilmer’s appearance tops out at around two minutes and he’s credited only as “Mentor.” But the suave voice whispering murderous thoughts into Slater’s ear is unmistakably intended to be the King’s, and Kilmer aces it.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1998Harvey Keitel, ‘Finding Graceland’ 🎸🎸🎸OK, so strictly speaking, Harvey Keitel is not Elvis but “Elvis,” a fictional older — and very much alive — version of Presley who faked his death in 1977 after becoming overwhelmed by the pressures of fame. Keitel nails the melted-chocolate quality of the rocker’s voice and delivers a full-throated portrayal of an over-the-hill King, complete with hip thrusts and shoulder shimmies. (The film was produced by Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, and scenes were actually filmed inside the Graceland mansion in Memphis.)Buy it on Amazon.2003Bruce Campbell, ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ 🎸🎸🎸In this R-rated comedy-horror flick, Bruce Campbell is an aged Elvis impersonator in a nursing home, Ossie Davis is a fellow resident who claims to be President John F. Kennedy, they fight an Egyptian mummy sucking out residents’ souls through their butts, and, just trust us, it works. Campbell brings an endearingly crusty charisma to the part, and his self-deprecating hospital-bed monologues about growing old are surprisingly moving.Stream it on Tubi or Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on Apple TV or Vudu.1988David Keith, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ 🎸🎸🎸“Heartbreak Hotel” sounds, from the title, like an Elvis-adjacent chick flick, but it’s actually a comedy written and directed by Chris Columbus about a teenage boy who kidnaps Elvis as a present for his mother when she’s recovering from a car crash. (Elvis happens to be his mom’s favorite singer.) Critics — and the public — gave Keith’s portrayal a rather tepid reception, with Rita Kempley of The Washington Post concluding in her scalpelesque pan that “Playing Elvis is like playing a Kennedy, nearly impossible.” At least someone liked it: Keith’s King, who was fatherly, clean-cut and drug-free, did get the blessing of the Presley estate and Elvis’s national fan club.Buy it on Amazon.1981Don Johnson, ‘Elvis and the Beauty Queen’ 🎸🎸This made-for-TV movie focused on the end of Elvis’s life and his relationship with the beauty-pageant contestant Linda Thompson, whom he was romantically involved with after the end of his six-year marriage to Priscilla Presley. To judge by YouTube clips, Johnson rocked a jumpsuit as a zonked-out Elvis, yes, but his high-pitched speaking voice was better suited for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch than a seduction scene, and his bushy black wig was downright hokey — and that was before the heavy eyeliner and mascara.2016Michael Shannon, ‘Elvis & Nixon’🎸If you didn’t hear a security guard say, “It’s Elvis Presley!” you wouldn’t know Michael Shannon’s careworn, sullen Elvis was supposed to be the King. His craggy face is at odds with the King’s smooth features, and, combined with a voluminous black wig, his Elvis smacks of Michael Crawford in “Dance of the Vampires.” The film, a historical comedy, focused on a 1970 meeting between Presley and President Richard Nixon (played by Kevin Spacey, who also does not resemble his real-lie counterpart). Shannon is a great character actor, but he can’t overcome this confoundingly bad casting, despite the gleaming gold belt buckle, tinted glasses, high-collared shirt and flashing rings.Stream it on Amazon Prime; rent it on DVD.com.2002Bonus: Stitch in ‘Lilo & Stitch’He ain’t nothin’ but a hound alien. In this animated comedy, Experiment 626 — a.k.a. Stitch — uses a black wig, white jumpsuit and ukulele to indulge Lilo as she tries to teach him to be a model citizen. And honestly, based on the number of beachgoers who swooned when they got one of his flirtatious winks, we’d have to crown him the hip-swivel champion.Stream it on Disney+; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. More

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    Don Johnson Is Back as ‘Nash Bridges.’ Why?

    The actor was already having a renaissance thanks to “Knives Out” and “Watchmen.” But those works don’t have a pedigree that includes Hunter S. Thompson.BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — On “Miami Vice,” Don Johnson, as the undercover cop Sonny Crockett, tooled around in speedboats and Ferraris, busted gunrunners and dope dealers and somehow made going sockless look good. The hit series transformed what a police procedural could look, sound and feel like — according to Hollywood lore, the show was pitched as “MTV cops” — and made Johnson an international star.But there is another, perhaps less appreciated contribution to Johnson’s global celebrity, one that predates his recent supporting roles in critically acclaimed films like “Knives Out” and TV series like “Watchmen.” From 1996 to 2001, he played the title character in “Nash Bridges,” a CBS police procedural that, like “Vice,” was set in a gorgeous city (San Francisco) and featured a buddy cop sidekick — played this time by Cheech Marin, one half of the stoner comedy duo “Cheech & Chong.” Twenty years on, Nash remains one of Johnson’s favorite roles.“I liked his nimbleness, how he could be funny one moment and dead cold serious the next,” Johnson said on a recent afternoon here at the Peninsula hotel. “And I was curious to see if I could capture that kind of lightning in a bottle again.”Cheech Marin, left, is back for the revival as well, as Nash’s buddy-cop sidekick, Inspector Joe Dominguez.David Moir/USA NetworkAt first blush, a leading role in the two-hour TV movie revival, “Nash Bridges,” debuting Saturday on USA, may not seem like the most obvious — or necessary — move for Johnson. But as with many a CBS procedural, the show’s popularity, and pedigree, belie the relative lack of attention it has received from the chattering classes. At its peak, “Bridges” had a sweet prime-time slot and a then-and-still-whopping $2 million-an-episode budget, with a weekly audience of more than 8 million viewers. In syndication, the series has found audiences in dozens of countries. And it’s a trivia lover’s dream, with origins tracing back to the writer Hunter S. Thompson.For Johnson, it is also his first time leading a police procedural in two decades. “I wouldn’t have been so excited about it if I had to write it for someone else,” he said.Johnson, who wrote the new movie with Bill Chais and Carlton Cuse, the creator of the original series, spoke candidly about his reasons for revisiting the ’90s procedural, in a wide-ranging conversation that also touched upon some of the stories from his younger, wilder days. Those reasons included love, money and the curiosity befitting a man who, at 71, is naturally given to reflections on the ways people change — or don’t — over time.He wanted to know what Nash — an amiable police inspector and amateur magician who patrolled San Francisco in an early ’70s bright yellow Plymouth Barracuda — would be like 20 years down the road. Not that he didn’t have ideas. Ideas derived, perhaps, from his own experience.The original series featured plots such as an undercover cop (played by the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin) kidnapping a chimp as part of a scheme to capture a terrorist animal rights activist. Spike Nannarello/CBS“I imagine him to still be very fit, and very capable,” Johnson said of Nash. “I imagine him to be wiser, and more thoughtful about things.”“He would still slap the crap out you,” he added, using a cruder term. “But he’d think about it first, and make sure it was coming from a good place.”The decades since “Vice” first made Johnson a star, in 1984, have given him plenty of material. They have, in fact, been the stuff of legend — not all of which is verifiable, and not all of which he remembers. He married Melanie Griffith (twice), set a world record in powerboat racing and released two hit singles (one with his then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand). There were struggles with substance abuse, stories of women’s underwear virtually raining from open windows. There was Miami in the ’80s.Along the way, Johnson had five children, including a daughter, Dakota (of the “Fifty Shades” franchise), who is racking up A-list anecdotes herself these days. More recently, he has undergone a kind of renaissance, transforming himself from a leading man into a versatile character actor, specializing in a kind of winkingly scuzzy, unreconstructed American male in films like “Machete” (2010) and “Django Unchained” (2012), and in TV shows like “Eastbound & Down” (2009-13).When Johnson first took on the role of Nash Bridges, he had been looking for a change. Despite the structural similarities of “Bridges” and “Vice,” its two lead characters were very different. While Sonny skewed toward the tormented and dour, Nash was upbeat and funny, quick with a snappy line. Johnson appreciated the break.“I’d just done a stint on ‘Miami Vice’ for five years, and the show and the character had just gotten darker and darker,” he said. “After a while, it was like, how dark and desolate and without hope can we make Sonny? And I said, ‘I’m not doing that again.’”“I’d just done a stint on ‘Miami Vice’ for five years, and the show and the character had just gotten darker and darker,” Johnson said about his choice to do the original “Nash Bridges,” which was considerably lighter.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe series began as something of a favor to Thompson, the iconoclastic journalist and writer of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” among other books, who was a neighbor and good friend of Johnson’s in Woody Creek, Colo., at the time.“I was hanging out at his house, and he allowed to me that he was broke,” Johnson said. “And I had this 22-episode commitment at CBS. It was probably 3 a.m. in the morning, and I said, ‘Let’s just conjure up something, and I’ll take it to CBS and see if we can get it done.’”They sketched out an idea about two off-duty cops hired to protect a senator’s wife with Tourette Syndrome, called, what else, “Off Duty.” Later that day, Johnson looked at what the two had wrought.“It was unmakeable,” said Johnson, who became an executive producer on the eventual show. The premise was rejiggered into a procedural about two on-duty cops who were always getting into mischief with off-hours, get-rich-quick schemes. Johnson had the writers watch the 1940 screwball comedy “His Girl Friday” to get a taste of the snappy repartee he wanted.“We were still adjusting the tone of the show through the first order of 12 episodes,” he said. Thompson ended up writing two episodes and making an uncredited cameo as a piano player in the first season.The show had notable talent above the line. “Bridges” was the first series Les Moonves greenlit as head of CBS. Cuse, the creator, went on to become a showrunner of “Lost,” among other series. Writers included Jed Seidel (“Terriers,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls”) and Shawn Ryan, the creator of “The Shield.”Damon Lindelof got his start on “Bridges” before going on to cocreate “Lost” and create the acclaimed HBO series “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen.”“I was a writer’s assistant before ‘Nash Bridges,’” Lindelof said. “Don and Carlton gave me my first big-boy job.”The show garnered strong ratings for six seasons before being unceremoniously dropped in 2001, the result of a dispute between CBS and Paramount, one of the show’s producers. The whole thing “left a sour taste in my mouth,” Johnson said.Johnson with Jamie Lee Curtis in a scene from “Knives Out,” one the many more recent films and TV series that have demonstrated his prowess as a character actor. Claire Folger/Lionsgate, via Associated PressThe new movie, he said, was one way to remedy that. Johnson has a deep, protective love of the character, so much so that when the actor’s business partners at Village Roadshow, who co-own the rights to “Bridges,” approached Johnson about reviving the show, he couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Nash.“When Michael Mann was going to make ‘Miami Vice’ as a movie, he didn’t call me, and I didn’t call him,” he said. “But I knew it was a mistake, and a no-win situation for Colin Farrell. Because everybody on the planet identified me with that character.”And of course, there were also the financial benefits of bringing back a property that Johnson’s production company owns a big piece of, including a portion of the original show’s 122-episode library.“If I didn’t think there was something worthy here, I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “But there’s no question there was a business component to it.” He hopes the “Bridges” movie might eventually lead to a series of some sort, or maybe a run of two-hour specials.In the revival, we catch up with Nash after 20 years — he’s still charming, still in San Francisco. (“We owned the city of San Francisco,” Marin recalled of the experience of shooting the original. “If you’ve gotta own a city, that’s the one to own.”) He and Marin’s character, Inspector Joe Dominguez, have evolved, but not so much that they aren’t befuddled by the changes that millennials and the intervening decades have wrought on the department.Production began in San Francisco in May. Johnson’s colleagues are quick to talk about what a fun and giving guy he is to work with and for, and the attention to detail he gives to every aspect of the show.“He knows the name of every crew member,” Marin said.Others mention his special skills, like his apparently uncanny abilities behind the wheel. For most driving sequences onscreen, the car is placed on a trailer so the actors don’t need to actually drive; sometimes they’re shot in a studio using green screens or projectors. The opening scene of the movie, which has Bridges zipping around San Francisco with a discombobulated Marin riding shotgun — that’s all Johnson.Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas starred in the hit ’80s TV series “Miami Vice,” which made Johnson into an international star and sex symbol.Sleuth “Don will hold the car at exactly 40 miles an hour to keep pace with the camera car, while doing a two-minute-long scene of dialogue perfectly,” said Greg Beeman, a director on both the original “Bridges” and the new one. “I’ve tried it after ‘Bridges,’ and no other actor can do it.”What co-workers won’t do is tell any Don Johnson tales out of school, even those they might have heard thirdhand or seen splashed across a tabloid.But Johnson will. That story about how he got sent to reform school at the age of 12 after hot-wiring a car? “Yeah, I probably made that up,” he said. The time he was snorting cocaine in the men’s bathroom of a club and ran into Jimi Hendrix? “That was a club in New York called the Hippopotamus,” he explained.Those wild “Vice”-era parties at Johnson’s home, where U2 and dozens of models might show up? Well, Johnson couldn’t go out back then. He was the hottest guy on the planet’s hottest show, so the party was brought to him.“What went on behind closed doors, I have no idea,” he said.These days, Johnson’s life is a lot more serene. In addition to his hopes for more “Bridges,” he has plans to do a film for Netflix, and has other projects in the works that he declined to name.Johnson can pick and choose projects “to a certain extent,” he said, but he still likes to be asked, as he was for “Bridges.”“I still like the idea that somebody asked for you,” he said. “I like the idea that someone sends a script and says, ‘We want Don Johnson to do this.’” More