Austin Butler

Austin Butler on honoring the King and feeling forever grateful for the support he's received from the Presley family.

I wanted to take one of them home so bad." "The thing that I wanted to keep was one of the cars," he says with a smile. "I don't karaoke and I don't really sing myself, but when you are able to be someone else, then that's where I feel free. "That's the thing that would shoot me out of bed in the morning every day [during production]. I had no idea how they were going to respond. ... it is just magic." "Elvis is so well-known and there's so many people out there who know every detail about his life," he says.

On the day of Austin Butler's final screen test for "Elvis," director Baz Luhrmann threw everything at him.

"But that terror of my whole career feeling like it was riding on this film, that's exactly what Elvis was feeling," says Butler. "His musical career was on the line. "I'm not here to tell the world that Elvis is a great person. The scene put a leather-clad Butler isolated on stage, with little to rely on beside his own ability to thrill a crowd. What's real and what's fake in the exaggerated land of the much-imitated Elvis hasn't always been easy to discern. But "Elvis" also offers a more youthful, rebellious portrait of Presley as a product of Black gospel music, a hip-shaking sex symbol in eyeliner and a progressive-minded nonconformist whose closely controlled career reflected cultural battles of then and now. As you'd expect, it breezes through pivotal moments in the Mississippi-born Memphis singer's life and a jukebox of songs. "Baz in the very first meeting said, 'Look, this is a story about two people. "It all feels sort of like this wonderful dream," Butler said the morning after the film's Cannes Film Festival premiere. He goes, 'Austin, I just wanted to be the first one to call you and say ... Are you ready to fly, Mr. Presley?'" The one minute of "Suspicious Minds" that Butler was to perform in a Presley jumpsuit stretched to six. I felt like my hands were tied behind my back,'" Butler said in a recent interview. Butler had spent five months building up to that moment, workshopping the role with Luhrmann, doing hair and make-up tests, rehearsing the songs.

Austin Butler opens up to POPSUGAR about tackling the role of Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's new film and how he prepared to play the singer.

. . . Getting everybody to play [the song] the way that it was in my mind — it was so liberating, and suddenly, you feel like you're out of your body. "We did it one take, and it was awful," Butler says. I was on the verge of an anxiety attack, [and] I just didn't feel ready at that time — then I spoke to Rami, and he really helped me." "You can only learn one thing at a time, so I would obsess about what his eyes were doing at a certain moment, what his hands were doing, or the way that his voice changed because it wasn't just one voice." The first thing Butler did when he was cast for "Elvis" in 2019 was call up dialect coach Tim Monich. "I said, 'We got to get to work,'" Butler says. That objective became his North Star in every "Elvis" scene he shot — one that would help him mold his version of Presley. "It's like trying to learn an entire orchestra piece, where you're trying to learn every note and every instrument," Butler notes. You want to see your soul and his soul colliding and creating something we've never seen before.'" The actor was all set to begin his "Elvis" journey, even spending time at Presley's Graceland in Memphis, TN, while preparing for the film. And I just thought, 'This is it, it feels like the stars aligning.'" While searching for his "Elvis" star, Luhrmann received a videotape of Butler tearfully singing Presley's cover of "Unchained Melody" — an informal audition that immediately caught his attention. Austin Butler never planned to play Elvis Presley in a movie.

The brief life of Elvis Presley is not something that fits neatly into a conventional...

Luhrmann never does anything by half measures, but perhaps one of the most striking thinks about “Elvis” is how ultimately restrained it is in the end. Though the film is flimsy with biographical facts, it does make sure to put Elvis’s Mississippi and Beale Street influences front and center. The artifice of his performance fits in the context of Luhrmann’s theatrical storytelling. His entire Hollywood career is summed up in a quick montage that ends with Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker saying in voiceover that “we had a lot of fun.” It was, perhaps, always going to take a director as wild and visionary as Baz Luhrmann to do something that evokes the essence of the King’s 42 years. The brief life of Elvis Presley is not something that fits neatly into a conventional biopic formula, though many have tried.

Baz Luhrmann directs Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in the new musical drama from Warner Bros.

Luhrmann never does anything by half measures, but perhaps one of the most striking thinks about “Elvis” is how ultimately restrained it is in the end. Though the film is flimsy with biographical facts, it does make sure to put Elvis’s Mississippi and Beale Street influences front and center. The artifice of his performance fits in the context of Luhrmann’s theatrical storytelling. His entire Hollywood career is summed up in a quick montage that ends with Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker saying in voiceover that “we had a lot of fun.” It was, perhaps, always going to take a director as wild and visionary as Baz Luhrmann to do something that evokes the essence of the King’s 42 years. The brief life of Elvis Presley is not something that fits neatly into a conventional biopic formula, though many have tried.