Director Baz Luhrmann was just four days away from shooting the first scene for his new Elvis Presley biopic when Tom Hanks fell ill with the coronavirus and the set was shut down.The filmmaker tells Deadline he was rehearsing a scene, in which hundreds of girls kiss Elvis, played by Austin Butler, when he learned Hanks was sick.“The interesting thing is, we’d had a very quiet incident a month earlier, where everyone was staying,” Baz recalls. “There was a family that had it (COVID-19 virus).
That connected us very closely with Dr. Wattiaux, a Gold Coast public health physician in Queensland, and the premier (Annastacia Palasczuk).