![]() ![]() “I’d been watching all these documentaries and learned a couple days prior that Elvis’s mom had passed away when he was 23, the same as me,” Butler says. And it felt so fresh and painful.” In 2014, Butler lost his mother and “best friend”-who shuttered her own business to support his career-to cancer. “I had this nightmare that my mother was alive again, but dying. It wasn’t truthful, you know?” Dispirited, he went to bed, only to be woken hours later by a bad dream. “But when I watched it back, it was an impersonation. “I taped ‘Love Me Tender’ in my bedroom,” he says. Butler then felt ready to record an audition for Luhrmann. He began by listening to Elvis Presley’s entire catalog, in chronological order, while painting the Los Feliz house he had just moved into. “I just said, I’m going to dedicate everything I have to this.” “It felt like the stars were aligning,” Butler says. Then, the opportunity landed on his front step: Luhrmann was working on an Elvis script. ![]() Butler, who had taught himself piano and guitar at a young age, practicing the six string so much he used superglue to mend his bleeding fingers, started thinking about securing the rights to Presley’s life story. I was singing along with it when my friend had kind of an epiphany: ‘You need to play Elvis.’ ” That friend was High School Musical alum Vanessa Hudgens, Butler’s ex-girlfriend of nine years. At Christmas, he remembers, “I was actually driving up through Griffith Park”-gesturing to our surroundings with his large hands, a physical similarity he shares with Presley-“and Elvis’s ‘Blue Christmas’ came on. With a successful Broadway debut under his belt, Butler returned to Los Angeles. When I bring up this review, Butler blushes and shrinks a bit with discomfort, but clearly the moment was pivotal. (Their relationship is at the heart of the new movie.) ![]() “It seems almost impossible what Dean was doing,” Butler says, “the animalistic power that he had.” Elvis Presley reportedly revered Dean, aspiring to emulate his movie career before being steered toward less serious fare by his longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in Luhrmann’s film. “I watched Rebel Without a Cause so many times.” East of Eden too, he tells me, describing how the television at his father’s house was always tuned to Turner Classic Movies. “James Dean was the actor I obsessed over as a kid,” Butler says. Butler explains that this is one of his favorite places in the city, in no small part because of its connection to James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 Nicholas Ray drama that anointed Dean an icon of youth rebellion. So we find a sunny spot to unmask on the terrace at the End of the Universe, the stargazing landmark’s on-site café. The county has just dropped its outdoor mask mandate, but they’re still required in the immediate vicinity of the Observatory, where locals, tourists, and a busload of Air Force Junior ROTC cadets-odd ducks in their pressed blue uniforms-have all converged on this 72-degree February day. While it may sound like a pickup line, particularly when delivered by the boyishly handsome Butler-in a husky drawl traceable to the actor’s titular role in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming biopic, Elvis-he’s talking about our masks, barriers that make the self-described shy “wallflower” all the more diffident. ![]() His job was not to be Presley because, as the film shows, there has only ever been one Elvis Presley.“I ’d like to be able to see your face,” Austin Butler says to me when we meet for the first time outside of Los Angeles’s Griffith Observatory, panoramic views of the Hollywood sign, the San Gabriel Mountains, and downtown L.A. Butler's performance in Elvis was in an effort to bring Presley's life story to the screen, which he does impeccably. In this way, it is likely that Presley's heavy drug use and age led to changes in his voice that were impossible for Butler to convey.įurthermore, while some may be disappointed by the audio assist in the film, using the stems to achieve vocal authenticity for the later years of Presley's life does not detract from the point of the biopic or Butler's work. However, the songs 30-year-old Austin Butler sings solo in Elvis end in 1968, when Elvis would have been 33 years old. Butler's performances throughout the first half of the film certainly assuage any doubt about his vocal abilities: his range and lilting Presley drawl when singing is flawless. While stereo sound (and thus, stereo stems) became the standard of audio production from the late 1960s onward, having access to Presley's original audio does not necessarily explain why Presley's voice was used over Butler's when filming the icon's late years in Elvis. ![]()
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