Elvis Presley Left 'Physically Ill' After Being 'Deeply Dissatisfied' With Hollywood Career, New Documentary Claims

Sadly, Elvis Presley was not satisfied with his iconic career.

The new Netflix documentary, Return of the King: The Fall & Rise of Elvis Presley, reveals the music legend's unhappiness with Hollywood kept him bedridden before he staged his huge comeback in 1968.

In the film, Presley himself explains the issue he had with how the public saw him after he began doing movies. "Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it, and I couldn’t do anything about it," the musician said in unearthed footage. "I didn’t know what to do. I just felt I was obligated to things I didn’t fully believe in."

"They couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to make me feel I had any satisfaction inside," he added.

The film's director Jason Hehir went on to claim the unhappiness made Presley "physically ill" that he became reclusive. "He was deeply dissatisfied. He couldn’t get out of bed," the filmmaker explained during a recent interview.

"Many . . . don’t realize how disappointed he was. He was taking these movie roles and seemingly just taking the easy way out and cashing enormous checks. But it wasn’t his ambition as an artist. It had always been a frustration for him. . . . He couldn’t even get out of bed because he was so starved for an artistic challenge. But he had locked himself into these movie contracts, and his management had allowed him to be locked into these movie contracts," Hehir said.

"It shined a light on what truly mattered to him – to perform," Hehir spilled. "And I think that frustration of seven years of not being in front of a live audience and instead, just being on movie sets doing increasingly more mediocre films – a light bulb went off over his head. He wanted to do something for himself, not for his management. Not for movie audiences. He wanted to get back to the Elvis he wanted to be."

In 1968, the "Burning Love" singer staged it return to the stage in his NBC special. However, it nearly didn't happen. "He almost didn’t leave his dressing room," Hehir claimed. "He was terrified of going back out in front of an audience, and he always had horrible stage fright. This goes back to the days of Ed Sullivan and the early days of performing in his career. He always had tremendous anxiety about going out and performing in front of people. But then, once he got out there, that’s where he was the most comfortable in the world, on a stage with a microphone in his hand."

Fox News digital conducted the interviews with Hehir.