Butler settled in and managed to suppress his panic, but he was mystified about how someone could operate at that acute intensity for so many days and weeks in a row, let alone so many years of a career. He asked Hanks, ever the elder statesman, for advice on how he’s managed to keep his sanity over the decades. Hanks had a simple tip, Butler recalls: “ ‘Every day I try to read something that has nothing to do with the job that I’m doing.’ ”
This advice was a relief. “That gave me permission, because up till that point, I was only reading everything to do with Elvis. I was only listening to Elvis. It was Elvis’s influences and Elvis himself and nothing else,” he says.
Elvis will premiere at Cannes. Though the man was an all-American artist who managed to entrance the world, the only international performing Elvis ever managed to do was in Canada. “The sad bit about it is that Elvis never got to tour the world,” Butler says. “That is a thing that I think a lot of people don’t quite realize. And that was a big thing that he really wanted to do.” (The rumored reason why he never went overseas was because Colonel Tom Parker was an undocumented immigrant who feared not being able to get back into the U.S.)
By the time the project wrapped in March 2021, Butler had given himself over to the role so much that his body revolted. “The next day I woke up at four in the morning with excruciating pain, and I was rushed to the hospital,” Butler says. He was diagnosed with a virus that simulates appendicitis and spent a week bedridden.
“My body just started shutting down the day after I finished Elvis.”
Countless stars have navigated the Disney and Nickelodeon pipelines on their way to long, meaningful careers. It starts with getting scouted—in Butler’s case, his stepbrother got noticed at the Orange County Fair and Austin tagged along with him to an audition, nabbing a background spot.
“I didn’t really have a passion for anything that included other people at that time,” he says. “I wouldn’t go play sports. I wouldn’t do things with other kids.” When he realized acting was something he could actually enjoy, he got a coach and gradually started booking more and more roles.
Soon, with the support of his parents, he left school to pursue acting full-time. “I never had a real prom,” he says. “But I had prom in a TV show. I tested out of high school when I was 15 and a half, but I kept writing essays because I was always afraid that I wouldn’t be able to communicate.” He applied similarly studious rigor to the industry. “I printed out the Pulp Fiction script when I was 12, and I’d read it to my mom in the car,” he says. “That was my dream from 12 years old. I said, ‘Quentin is the director I want to work with.’ ”
First, he had to appear in a revolving door of kid and young adult series (Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, The Carrie Diaries) in which he was mostly introduced walking through doorways while girls turned their heads and swooned. These parts still get him
recognized on the street occasionally, but it wasn’t exactly where his heart was at.
“I wanted to do a part like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or The Basketball Diaries,” he says. “I was watching Raging Bull, and those types of films, and going, ‘I don’t want to be just a guy who walks in slo-mo through a door.’ ”
So how did he finally extricate himself from teen-crush territory? Butler pauses to think about it. “Do you ever listen to Ira Glass?” he asks, referencing the popular public-radio personality. “There’s that one quote, where he talks about how there’s this gap between where your skill is and where your taste is.” You may want to make work that corresponds with your taste, but your capabilities aren’t quite there yet. Butler says he related to that, being firmly in the middle of that gap and mostly taking jobs to pay the bills.
His dream at that time was to do a play in New York, which came true when he landed a part in a 2018 Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. One of his costars was Denzel Washington. “There’s that thing where you meet your heroes, and you want to be their best friend,” Butler says. “I was like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ So, I went into the quickest mentality of ‘I’m not going to try to be his friend, I’m just going to try to do work as well as I possibly can.’ ” Butler showed up at the table read for the play, having memorized the entire mammoth script. Then he would try to arrive at the theater earlier than Washington every single performance. Eventually, the legendary actor caught on to what was happening.
One day, Washington waved him over and said, “Hey, I got an idea for you,” Butler shares. “Then I sat down; it’s just Denzel and me in this empty theater. He started giving me acting advice and he really took me under his wing. He’d start telling me thoughts about the scene, and suddenly I’ve got Denzel almost as an acting coach.” And maybe even a life coach. “Denzel always goes back to gratitude,” Butler adds. “I look at that for longevity in any career. Having those moments where, at the best of times or the worst of times, you’re being grateful for what you actually have and having humility.”
Critics started to notice Butler too. Hilton Als, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, both opened and closed his review praising Butler and highlighting him as the standout among his more seasoned castmates. “Most performers want to be seen at any cost,” Als wrote, “but actors—at least, those as good as Butler—are both determined and relaxed in their ambition to do justice to the playwright’s text while contributing to the life of the story.”
The play put him on the map and vaulted him to the company of his other heroes—Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, directed by, yes, Quentin Tarantino. Butler remembers one night shoot, in which Tarantino ordered a crepe truck to the set at 3 a.m. “We were sitting there eating Nutella crepes, and Quentin goes, ‘How great is this?’ ” Butler recalls. “I think back to my 12-year-old self, being there with Quentin and eating a crepe at three in the morning on his set. And he goes, ‘You know what my goal is? My goal is to give everybody on this set such a good time that their next job sucks.’ ”
By the time that next job rolled around, Butler had someone huge in his corner. As Luhrmann tells it: “I get a phone call out of the blue from Denzel Washington, who I did not know. Denzel Washington just said, in the most incredibly emotional and direct way, ‘Look, I’ve just been onstage with this young actor. I’m telling you, his work ethic is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone who devotes every single second of their lives to perfecting a role.’ ”
“I was so grateful for that,” Butler tells me. “He didn’t call me beforehand, he didn’t call me after. It was this generous thing that he just did.”
“My family said I didn’t sound like me anymore,” Butler says. He emerged from Elvis changed in a myriad of ways. His voice, for starters. Over the course of filming, his relationship of nine years with fellow former teen star Vanessa Hudgens also ended. “Life is full of changes, and you’ve got to find a way to constantly be evolving and growing,” he non–answers, politely, when I bring it up.
After Butler recovered from his post-Elvis medical emergency, he immediately flew to London to begin working on Masters of the Air. Following a mandatory quarantine, he and his castmates were put through a mock boot camp run by Dale Dye, a military veteran who has offered this service on projects such as Platoon and Band of Brothers. And yet, Butler still couldn’t shake Elvis off. Even as a brand-new character, he felt as if he were channeling the King. “I was like, ‘This is what Elvis felt when he was put into the Army,’ ” Butler says. “You know, performing, and the glamour of it and hearing screaming fans, and then suddenly you’re just dressed like everybody else in those fatigues.” Director Cary Fukunaga noticed too: “I was aware when he showed up, he was still very much Elvis.”
During his 10 months in London for Masters of the Air, Butler fell in love with the city, so much that he’s considering moving there. He would spend his free time riding his bike and visiting museums and the Reference Point library, poring over rare art and poetry books. Sunday nights were devoted to cooking dinner and playing cards with a group of friends at famed River Cafe chef Ruthie Rogers’s home. “I just feel like everybody made me feel very welcome,” Butler says. “There was a lot of kindness there.”
Since returning to Los Angeles, he’s been enjoying a rare spell of downtime between projects. Of course, this is only the beginning for him. He is rumored to have been cast in Dune: Part Two as the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (played by a codpiece-wearing Sting in the 1984 original). When it comes to the future of his career, he wants to continue going deeper and darker. Paul Thomas Anderson is one director he’s dying to work with. Alejandro Iñárritu is another. “The way that Leo has done it has been really, really impactful on me,” Butler says.
Luhrmann, who cast a young Leonardo DiCaprio in 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, actually drew a comparison between the two actors. Just recently, Butler and Luhrmann met up with Leo after a Lakers game. “I think Leonardo was recognizing what Austin’s about to go through,” Luhrmann told me. “The difference for Austin, and this is fortunate, is that Austin is very young looking, but he’s 30.”
Butler mostly stays off the internet. He’s been photographed recently with the model Kaia Gerber, and their relationship is already an object of intense speculation. “I go, ‘If I don’t see the picture, then it doesn’t really exist to me.’ I don’t want to be really negative, but there’s hardly any job I despise more than paparazzi,” he says, in the same sunny tone of voice that most people would use to compliment someone’s shirt. He is similarly positive when I try to get him to open up about his relationship with Gerber. “I don’t think there’s anything I want to share about that,” he says. “But thank you for providing the space.”
Butler is still recording music for the film, so he’s not quite done with Elvis yet. He’s happy to have a bit more time with him. “It’s comforting to me now, when I get in the car. I’ll just go, ‘What do I want to listen to?’ Usually I just end up popping on Elvis,” he says. “I’ve never loved somebody I’ve never met more than Elvis.”