An exclusive look into Austin Bulter's journey to playing Elvis, the leading role of a lifetime
“I ’d like to be able to see your face,” Austin Butler says to me when we meet for the first time outside of Los Angeles’s Griffith Observatory, panoramic views of the Hollywood sign, the San Gabriel Mountains, and downtown L.A. all around us.
But then a week later, he received an unexpected call from his agent about the Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’swith Denzel Washington. Butler, who has a workman’s approach to his craft, spent days with his acting coach, Larry Moss, painstakingly creating his audition tape—the first “short film” he shot with his new camera—and handily won the part of the deeply troubled 18-year-old Don Parritt.
He began by listening to Elvis Presley’s entire catalog, in chronological order, while painting the Los Feliz house he had just moved into. Butler then felt ready to record an audition for Luhrmann. “I taped ‘Love Me Tender’ in my bedroom,” he says. “But when I watched it back, it was an impersonation. It wasn’t truthful, you know?” Dispirited, he went to bed, only to be woken hours later by a bad dream. “I had this nightmare that my mother was alive again, but dying.
That record was the ballad “My Happiness,” which Elvis paid four dollars to lay down at Sam Phillips’s legendary Sun Records in Memphis as a birthday present for his mother, or so the legend goes. Presley would go on to record some two dozen more songs at the Sun Records studio—where Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Cash, and B.B. King all launched their careers—before switching management to the Colonel.
Living alone and socially distanced in an oceanside apartment on the Gold Coast of Australia, Butler created an unusual nest for himself. “I made the entire place look like a detective film, where there’s images of everything connected with the strings and stuff,” he says, describing the evidence board, or so-called crazy wall, he created of Presley’s life. “I did have days of feeling lonely,” he admits, “and, at one point, I went three months without a hug. That was really rough.
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