This story about Austin Butler and “Elvis” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap awards magazine..
In many ways, the central song to Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is “Suspicious Minds,” the rousing 1969 single that was Elvis Presley’s first No. 1 record in seven years. The key lines of that song, which Luhrmann uses as a kind of leitmotif in the film’s final stretches, are “We’re caught in a trap, we can’t get out,” which are partly a declaration of love from the singer. but also a cry of despair from a man whose fame has set him on the path of excess and early death.
And nine months after the film premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and three weeks after it received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, “Elvis” star and Best Actor nominee Austin Butler, walked into a restaurant in the Beverly Hilton Hotel and immediately found himself in a trap of his (and Luhrmann’s) making. First, a father stopped him and asked for a photo of Butler with his youngest son, who the father said is a huge fan of the film. Butler smiled, leaned in to greet the boy, and posed for a couple of photos. As soon as he finished, he was approached by fans from Ireland, then a couple from London and then some from closer to home. He only needed to traverse about 20 feet to get to the table where we were supposed to be talking, but by the time he got there, he’d probably posed for a picture for every 20 feet.
But when the 31-year-old former child actor from Orange County, California slid into the booth, he was sporting a big smile. “I feel very, very good,” Butler said at the end of a long day at the Oscar nominees luncheon. He nodded at the selfie mitt he had just run. “That’s something I’ve been getting in certain places, and I’m trying to get more used to it.”
Shrugged. “These are surreal days.”
THINGS HAVE BEEN DIRECTED TOWARDS SURREALISM for Butler since Cannes, when “Elvis” garnered largely positive reviews that focused on how a mostly unknown former teen actor nailed the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll moves and even did a creditable job singing his early classics. Suddenly, the guy who had beaten out a quartet of bigger stars for the part (Ansel Elgort, Harry Styles, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Miles Teller were the other names on the list) had become a star of his own, a sex . symbol and a sure candidate for an Oscar.
“It really has been a whirlwind,” Butler said quietly. “A roller coaster. I mean, really high highs…” he trailed off. “And then lows.”
The higher bass doesn’t come as a surprise. “For me, it was losing Lisa Marie,” she said, referring to the death of Elvis’s only daughter at the age of 54, just three days after she attended the Golden Globes to support the film. “That was unimaginable, so shocking that I really didn’t believe it was true. And it just changed my perspective on things, you know?
“But I also see this film as a way to carry on her legacy and her father’s legacy in a way that she was proud of. That’s why I feel honored to be a part of her life and all the moments I was lucky enough to spend with her”.
Those moments began after a screening of “Elvis” at Graceland, the singer’s longtime Memphis home. “She was walking down this hallway outside the screening room, and she turned around at the end of the hallway and we made eye contact,” he said. “We both cried just looking at each other, and then she hugged me and said, ‘I want to talk to you in private.’ She took me to another room and we sat there and talked and talked and talked, and later that night she took me to Elvis’s room and we spent more hours together talking.
“I had been experiencing so much love for her through her father, even if it was only in my imagination, and suddenly we were together. And each of us had our own losses in our lives, gaps that we began to fill for each other. It was really special.”
That immersion in all things Elvis, to the point of developing love for a woman he didn’t know because she was playing his father, was part of what convinced Luhrmann that Butler was the right choice. “He really lived Elvis 24/7 for two years,” said Luhrmann. “He didn’t win the part, he just came and never left. And when he arrived, he was already in the way of Elvis ”.
BEFORE ELVIS”, Butler had been acting since her teens, first on TV shows like “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide”, then on “Hannah Montana” and “Zoey 101”, among others. “I was a very introverted kid,” he said. “I loved playing the guitar, but I wouldn’t play it for anyone, and I didn’t really like hanging out with other kids. I was very isolated until I found acting, when I started to open up all these pieces of myself that I had repressed and would not show the world.
After a few years, he began to take the profession more seriously: “I was looking for (acting) coaches. Who does Leo work with? Who does Sam Rockwell work with? I found voice and dialect coaches, and started trying to figure out how to improve.”
For his “Elvis” audition, he sent Luhrmann a tape of himself playing and singing the 1950s hit “Unchained Melody.” When he chose it, he had no idea it was the song whose 1977 rendition by a sick and exhausted Elvis would end the movie.
“It was just a song that resonated with me,” said Butler, whose mother had died in 2014. “While trying to figure out what to send Baz, I had a nightmare that my mother was dying again. I woke up and all the pain was just on the surface, and for some reason, ‘Unchained Melody’ came to me. I had always taken it for granted that it was a romantic song that you sing to your partner, but for me, at that moment, I thought that I could sing those exact same words to my mother.
As soon as Luhrmann announced that Butler had landed the part, the director heard from Denzel Washington, who had worked with Butler on a Broadway production of “The Iceman Cometh.” “He said, ‘You’re going to experience a work ethic like no other,’” Luhrmann said. “I thought he was just being supportive and nice, but Austin’s work ethic really is on another level.”
Butler remained steeped in Elvis for years, even through COVID delays, eventually leading to a performance that stunned a skeptical Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s ex-wife. “I was worried, because I know how crazy Baz can be,” said Priscilla, who insisted on seeing the film with Elvis’s old friend Jerry Schilling at a private screening before deciding whether to support it by going to Cannes. “We sat there watching the movie and watching Austin, and when it was over we couldn’t talk. And finally, Jerry turned to me and said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to Cannes, right?’”
After a while, he emailed Luhrmann and raved about the movie and the performance. “She said, ‘She was great, but how could she have known about the loneliness that she only showed up in private moments?’” Luhrmann said.
SO HOW DID YOU KNOW? “It was a lot of little keys,” Butler said. “I could read a sentence in a book that sparked my imagination in a certain way where I could imagine what, what I was feeling at a certain moment. Or stories that people told me of moments with him. Or I would see a clip in a documentary where you suddenly see a wave of sadness on his face after a moment of joy. Things like that would be key to his humanity.”
He doubts. “Certain things start out external, and then you ask why and you keep digging deeper and deeper. Sometimes you don’t even know if it’s the right answer, but it awakens something in your soul. And so for me it was finding these things that were actually very similar to my own spirit or pains that we had both experienced. That’s what empathy really is, right? Find the ways that you can embrace the parts of yourself that are like that person.”
And now, after the years of preparation and the film and awards season ending March 12 at the Dolby Theatre, how does Butler decompress and leave Elvis behind? Or can he ever leave Elvis? “I think it’s a process,” he said. “When we finished the movie, it was quite a challenge because I really enjoyed it. I had a bit of an existential crisis when I finished, and real pain. I missed him. So it’s been good these eight or nine months of being able to relive things and put myself back in that place.”
Even now, he said, he likes to have some Elvis pieces hanging around. And no, he’s not talking about his voice, which people love to point out still sounds Presley-esque. “That’s so funny to me I don’t even know what to say about it,” she said with a puzzled look. “If he was trying to sound like Elvis, he would sound very different.”
Still, Elvis is there. “Kind of like being on stage was kind of scary for me as Austin,” he said. “But when I was able to live inside Elvis, he gave me a way to channel that fear. And I also have social anxiety – being in large groups is not my most comfortable place. So having a way to harness your energy helps, and that might be why it’s mentioned over and over again. Usually I’m in an environment where I have to take advantage of it. It’s almost like tools in a utility belt: I have bits of Elvis that subconsciously make me feel comfortable. He `s always with me”.
If that’s the case, Butler recently took Elvis on a trip to the desert planet of Arrakis for Denis Villeneuve’s second film, “Dune,” in which he plays the seductive but villainous Feyd-Rautha, the same role played by Sting. in the David Lynch film. -The Fated 1984 adaptation. And he’s in Jeff Nichols’ next film, “The Bikeriders,” in which he stars with Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon and Jodie Comer in the story of a Midwestern motorcycle club. “Just being able to see Michael Shannon perform was enough,” he said.
“Elvis”, however, has changed what he is looking for in his career. “There were so many years that I was unemployed for long periods of time, so I’m very lucky to be working,” he said. “But now I’m in a place where I can take a little more time. I’m just trying to be patient and find something that when you find out, you just can’t help but do it. I’m looking for something that’s terrifying, something that’s really challenging that I can totally throw myself into.
“The process around the way we did ‘Elvis’ inspires me about how I want to work in the future. Just taking a lot of time to prepare for something so that you can live in the world for as long as possible. I really enjoyed that process and I want to do it again.”
Read more of the Down to the Wire issue here.
