The chameleonic actor on looking for love on film, finding artistic inspiration, and growing up: “I used to think that in order to be a great artist, I had to destroy the rest of my life.”
James Dean in East of Eden, Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Montgomery Clift in anything—Austin Butler speaks of them with reverence, and a sense of nostalgia for something he never possessed. “The days where you didn’t know so much about people? I long for that.”

His 3.9 million Instagram followers notwithstanding, Butler is an analog guy in a digital world. Darren Aronofsky, who directed him in this year’s Caught Stealing, has said that seeing Butler using a cell phone is like watching Joe Biden use one. “I am not on my phone,” Butler confirms to me. “It can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing. When I’m with you, I’m completely with you, in person. But then when I’m away, it’s as though you’ve got to send a carrier pigeon or something.”

When we speak—not via carrier pigeon—he’s beaming in from a sunny California home, backdropped by an anodyne kitchen and wearing a crisp white T. The brow ridge is prominent, the jaw expressive, the blue eyes obliging. He shifts easily between smoldering attentiveness and a goofy, nose-scrunched laugh—bringing to mind his ability to draw focus whether he’s slow-dancing with a husky (in a promo clip for the 2024 series Masters of the Air) or going all-in as a bald, black-toothed psychopath (in Dune: Part Two). As Austin Butler, he’s a self-identified shy person with abundant charisma, which he turns on in any number of interviews with costars and media. He’s a glutton for other people’s lives: “That’s why, right now, I want to ask you a ton of questions.”

Is this tendency to shun attention self-protective? “Maybe there’s some deeper childhood thing in there,” he says, “but often I just find other people so fascinating.” He is charmed, for instance, by “everything.” Curiosity. Passion. The way someone twirls their pasta. “When people make little noises when they eat. ‘Mm, mm!’” He laughs. We’re 45 minutes into the conversation, and a level of comfort has been reached. “I love to watch somebody blush. That’s one of the most amazing things.” I tell him I can’t cosign this, as someone who goes frequently crimson. “I noticed,” he says. “Right to the surface.”

There is a certain fated quality to Butler’s rise: how he grew up between the sprawling amusement parks of Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, and used to get a buck from his dad for each Turner Classic Movie he recorded onto a VHS tape. How he caught his first break on Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana, and hit the big time in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood, wearing a cowboy hat, riding a horse, and sharing scenes with Brad Pitt. (The day we speak, TMZ reports that Butler just purchased a $5.2 million minimalist manse from Pitt.)

But working onstage in New York is what gave Butler his greatest epiphany. From Denzel Washington, his costar in the 2018 Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, he learned there is no single right way to run any given scene; ever since, he’s tried to capture the ephemerality of the theater even when making films. He’s notoriously meticulous in his preparation. After making 2022’s Elvis, he spent months trying to shake the accent he’d worked so hard to acquire; at an early cast meeting for Dune, he surprised the other actors by unveiling a voice that sounded uncannily like that of Stellan Skarsgård, who was playing his character’s uncle. “It’s this blurry picture,” Butler says of assuming a new role. “And then, little by little—and I feel that I’m slower than a lot of people, to be honest—I just am trying everything I can to make it come into focus.”

Describing Hank, his former baseball-playing, current bartender character in the gritty crime thriller Caught Stealing, Butler reaches for a War on Drugs lyric: “I’m just living in the space between the beauty and the pain.” It wasn’t hard for him to relate to a character who experienced trauma; Butler lost his own mother to cancer in 2014. Afterward, “I found myself just wanting to numb myself out. I didn’t want to open that door of the grief. It took away from my ability to experience all the beauty and ecstasy of the world.”

Though there isn’t an obvious throughline in his roles, they often tip toward darkness. “I used to think that in order to be a great artist, I had to destroy the rest of my life,” he says. “So much of it is this fear that my own experience, my own emotions, my own soul isn’t enough.” These days, he’s working on stripping down, stepping back. “How can my own experience of being a human being somehow connect to other human beings?” Even what Butler calls those “loser” decisions of years past—the ones that hurt someone, that make him ask “why was I so selfish?”—are worth excavating. “You get one life,” he says, “so how can I allow that to hopefully make me a better friend and a better partner—and a better husband, one day, and a better father, one day, God willing?”

When I ask what’s on his wish list, Butler says he’d like to explore “the complexities of two human beings who are coming together and falling in love”—something like Ryan Gosling’s performance in Blue Valentine, “one of the first times I remember going to the cinema by myself and crying my eyes out.” Speaking of love: Butler is ostensibly single when we speak. When asked about recent rumors linking him to model-actor-author Emily Ratajkowski, he looks sheepish and sits back in his chair. “The true answer is that I have a lot of friends, and we’re friends and we had dinner, and that we’re friends.” Rabid public scrutiny into his private life once felt stifling. “I just wanted to hide.” Now, his attitude has shifted: “I’m going to live a constricted small life because I’m afraid of what other people are going to say or what they’re going to think?” Life’s too short for that.

Still, getting out of the spotlight is liberating. The weekend before we speak, he and a couple of friends absconded to the Eastern Sierra Mountains. They hiked long, painful miles into the woods, weathered a hailstorm, pitched a tent, and greeted the morning by jumping into a frigid lake. “It’s so humbling when you’re away from the noise,” he says. “More and more I want that in my life, just not tuning into that noise.”