The secret to Blake Rayne’s success? “A lot of dumb luck. I fully admit that,” he tells The Post.
The singer-actor’s story reads like something out of a movie. He went from being a Web site designer, to one of the country’s top Elvis impersonators, to now improbably starring in “The Identical,” opening Friday.
Rayne (real name Ryan Pelton) grew up in Georgia and Ohio. He was always getting comments that he looked like a young Presley, and when he joined the Marines out of high school, his nickname was “Elvis.”
Then in 1998, he entered an Elvis impersonator contest at an Ohio vintage car show, despite never having performed before.
“It just felt like it was the right thing to do,” he says. “Sometimes in life, something will get placed in front of you that’s out of your comfort zone, and sometimes you have to take it and go down that road.”
Rayne, 41, wasn’t an Elvis fan, didn’t have a singing background and didn’t even know the lyrics to “Jailhouse Rock,” so he wrote them on his hand, only to discover as he was about to step on stage that he’d sweated them off. He sang the same verse five times in a row, but still won the contest, and the victory landed him an agent and a new career traveling the country as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
He played state fairs, casinos and the opening of the king cobra exhibit at the Philadelphia Zoo. (He also won $137,500 on the game show “The Weakest Link.”)
In 2007, he performed a duet on “American Idol” with Celine Dion. Or at least, his body did. Elvis’ real head was digitally pasted over Rayne’s for the broadcast.
One day, he was in a Nashville rehearsal studio when he met a producer who was looking for a place to record songs for an upcoming film.
The movie was “The Identical,” about two babies separated at birth in the Depression-era South. One grows up to become an Elvis-like rock star (played by Rayne), while the other (also played by Rayne) is adopted by a preacher and has his musical ambitions stymied by his conservative father.
The producer liked what he saw of Rayne that day in the rehearsal studio, and after a few more meetings, the singer was offered the lead role.
“Later, I was in LA taking acting classes, and I remember getting the phone call, ‘Yeah, Ashley Judd is on board as your mother. And Ray Liotta is gonna play your dad,’ ” Rayne says. “I just about passed out.”
He’s now writing and touring his own songs.
“It’s just been a wild, crazy ride,” he says.