Austin Butler reveals the piece of advice Tom Hanks gave to him while filming ElvisMovie. Our cover story:
Faced with the daunting prospect of portraying Elvis across three decades, Butler set out to strip away everything that had come before. "My big goal right from the beginning was not becoming a caricature of him," he says. "There are so many people out there who have their own Elvis voice, and you realize that most of those are caricature — the way that they curl their lip, or they deepen their voice deeper than his voice ever was.
Once he'd won the role through an extensive process involving scene workshopping and lengthy improvisation sessions, Butler threw himself into a rigorous year-and-a-half period of preparation, extended by a pandemic delay in shooting. His hair was already dyed black from having recently portrayed Manson family member Tex Watson inbut with that surface similarity out of the way, Butler set about trying to unpack who Elvis Presley really was.
He worked with the film's movement coach, Polly Bennett, to locate Elvis in his body. "We'd find these moments that could somehow express his humanity," Butler says. "You want it to be identical, but it's got to feel like it's never happened before." "That was one of the first keys that connected me to him on a very human level rather than the idea of Elvis," says Butler, whose mother died of cancer in 2014. "Learning how close he was with his mom, because my mom was my best friend, I could connect to him on that level of grief."
Butler stresses Presley's spirituality as his path to Elvis' soul. "People ask me about 'ways in,' and it was never about the external," the actor explains. "It was always about the music moving him. Being in that gospel church was a pivotal moment for me. Everybody just started wailing. I was standing in the middle of it, chills down my body, tears down my face, stomping my feet. That was the moment where I felt my soul stirring.
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