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FIRST IT WAS A VIRUS. Austin Butler had just finished filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2021 when he woke up in severe, appendicitis-like pain. He was hospitalized and spent a week in bed.

Next, it was a bizarre episode of temporary blindness. While flying to shoot The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s saga of a Midwestern biker gang, he jolted awake with a terrible migraine just as the plane was landing. He lost his vision for several minutes and felt a euphoric sensation. He suspected he was dying. He willed his sight to come back, and slowly it did; he headed to set and worked the whole day, writing the incident off as a side effect of sleep deprivation.

Then, after the virus and the blindness and the migraine and the feeling like he was dying, it was a sudden terrible pain in his foot that began in South Korea on the press tour for Dune: Part Two, in which he played wraithlike, psychopathic nepo baby Feyd-Rautha. For eight months he walked with his toes curled under to avoid worsening the pain. Finally, a doctor in New York City removed a piece of glass about the size of a grain of rice.

Life often throws down medical spike belts to slow us down. A stressful period at work is punctuated by a fierce head cold; a too-long run gives us a spooky pain in the top of one foot that goes away only when we’re at the podiatrist’s office; a night of one (four) too many margaritas is capped by an immobilizing hangover that leaves us staring apathetically at the ceiling like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, promising ourselves that we’ll lead pure lives henceforth. Where most of us pause after these moments, Butler, now 34, was zooming right on through, his tires deflating and slapping against the road until he lost control of the vehicle.

To Butler, acting had always meant alienation from his body and mind. When he was filming Elvis in 2020 and 2021, he took up the singer’s distinctive lazy drawl to the extent that he required a dialect coach to un-Elvis. The performance earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor, but it also took over his life. He disappeared into the role, he says over dinner at the Chicago steakhouse Bavette’s in June. “And then it’s done, after three years. And then it’s like, Wait, what do I focus on now? What do I read about? What do I watch? What do I like? And also, I haven’t talked to my friends. Who do I call?”

Butler’s career began when he was just a preteen, with appearances in Hannah Montana and a splat of Nickelodeon shows. But his roles matured, incrementally at first—he played a heartthrob in the teen dramatic series Switched at Birth, then a heartthrob in The Carrie Diaries, a young-ified adaptation of Sex and the City—and then all at once. In 2018, he acted alongside Denzel Washington in a Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. He was awed by the writing and by his colleagues and felt like he had to prove himself over and over, every night; he did, earning rave reviews. (“Butler conveys what many of his castmates try to show by shouting and grandstanding: his character’s inner life,” a New Yorker critic wrote.) That was when his career shifted, he recalls. Right after Iceman, he was cast in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and then, upon Washington’s recommendation, he was cast as Elvis.

The momentum continued. In 2023 he starred in The Bikeriders, and in 2024 he stole scenes in the Apple TV+ World War II miniseries Masters of the Air and in Dune: Part Two. This summer he stars in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, a nail- biting thriller in which an unfortunate encounter forces Butler’s character, a baseball star turned bartender named Hank, to become an everyman action hero. When we meet in Chicago, he’s shooting Enemies, a cat-and-mouse story in which he stars as a killer opposite Jeremy Allen White’s detective. Elvis could have been a too-much-too-soon peak for a young actor, but for Butler, it was merely a springboard into more high-profile and highly varied films.

He had, by most definitions, made it. Having spent his career Free Solo-ing up Hollywood’s sheer granite rock face with white knuckles, he was now able to perch on a ledge and survey the Pridelands. “For a long time, I felt that it had to be a tortured process and I would come out the other side broken,” he says. Acting had meant erasing himself. But he saw glimmers of another way. “Rather than just putting parts of yourself away and trying to pretend that they don’t exist, it’s like going into the gross bits of yourself—going into the bits that you don’t want to look at—and finding a way of integrating that into the whole.” The actor, famous for immersing himself in his roles, decided to go Method on Austin Butler.

By the time he arrived in Chicago to shoot Enemies, he was working to dilute his preoccupation with his work. “It was something that he and I started speaking about almost immediately,” Jeremy Allen White says, remembering a van ride the two shared after their first meeting to talk about Enemies. Butler asked White about playing Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming Deliver Me from Nowhere, and White, who had read interviews with Butler about his obsessive approach to playing Elvis, asked him about that film. “I asked, ‘Can you do that every time and still maintain a life that you’re happy with?’ And he said, ‘No. I don’t think so,’” White recalls. “I think Austin is at this point in his life where doing the best work he can is very important, and I think it always will be, but I think he’s searching for some stability in life as well.”

Maybe he can’t give what he gave to Elvis to every role. But maybe he doesn’t have to.

Read the full article at the Men’s Health website.