During Austin Butler’s promotional tour for Elvis, I read several of his interviews, and he comes across really well. He’s very professional, and he’s worked very hard for this “big break,” the lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. That being said, I still have some doubts about him. He covers VMAN and I can only assume that we’re in the middle of an eight-month Oscar campaign. Maybe it will work out for him – the reviews of Elvis were pretty good, and hey, it’s Elvis! But again, I also wouldn’t be surprised if everyone sort of ignored this movie during the awards season. It could go either way. I respect that Butler is a hustler though. Some highlights from his VMAN interview:

Baz Luhrmann made him cry: “Well, when I was on my first day in the recording studio, Baz wanted me to get as close to performing as possible. He had all the executives and everybody from RCA, who were back in the offices, he brought them into the recording studio and he goes, ‘I want you all to sit facing Austin,’…and he told them to heckle me. So then they were making fun of me and stuff while I was singing. When we were filming this moment when Elvis first goes on stage and he’s getting heckled by the audience, I knew what that felt like. I went home in tears that night. I really did.”

Leo DiCaprio warned him: “I had spoken to Leo before and he said, ‘Baz is gonna push you in ways you didn’t know somebody could. He’s gonna push you off balance and keep you off balance.’”

When Tom Hanks got Covid: “The producers set up this meeting with us and the top scientists in Australia, disease experts or something. The whole cast was there and I was next to Tom…they’re teaching us about the virus and telling us everything they knew at the time, and at a certain point, Tom leans over and he whispers to me. He goes, ‘If I get it, you’re getting it too.’ Two days later, he got it. We were about four days into filming.”

The six month delay on filming during the pandemic: “It just seemed to collapse,” he says. They began booking flights back to the States for all the U.S. actors, besides Butler, who refused. “I said, you know, if I go back, I’m gonna lose momentum. I would rather stay, even if I have to pay for my own apartment in Australia and be there while nobody is there. So I stayed in Australia and it turned out to be six months that we shut down…. I didn’t have a hug for three months at one point.”

Pulp Fiction: “When I was 12, I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time. That was the first time that it hit me, that a movie could be like that, that you could write a film like that. So I printed out the script, and I lived in Orange County at the time and my mom and I would drive up to auditions or acting classes. And I would read the Pulp Fiction script out loud to my mother in the car.”

His work on Nickelodeon and Disney: He was getting steady acting jobs to pay the bills, but was less than artistically satisfied. “For most of my career, I was doing things I wasn’t really proud of. I was doing work that I would watch and cringe.”

[From VMAN]

Butler needs to stop talking about how embarrassed he is of his earlier work in interviews. We get it – your Disney work didn’t feed your artistic soul, now hush. He certainly cashed all of those paychecks from Disney though! And there’s nothing wrong with that – he was a working actor doing stuff for the money. Big deal. As for Baz Luhrmann hazing him and making him cry… I would have been out of there, but I “get” what Baz was doing and I guess Butler understood it too.

Covers courtesy of VMAN.