How 'Elvis' star Austin Butler lost — and found — himself in the King of Rock 'n' Roll
It was early 2019 in Los Angeles, and Austin Butler already had Elvis on the brain. A friend, hearing him sing along to "Blue Christmas" in the car, had urged him to portray the icon one day; others brought it up too. Elvis seemed to be everywhere, but it was a dream role that felt impossible.
Then the universe called. Or rather, his agent did, to say that filmmaker Baz Luhrmann was making a movie about Presley's life.
Coming off several milestones the previous year — filming Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Don't Die" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," making his Broadway debut opposite Denzel Washington in "The Iceman Cometh" — the rising actor put all auditions and meetings on hold for the next five months to concentrate on landing the role of a lifetime.
"I threw all my eggs in one basket," said Butler, now 30, with a lingering hint of a honeyed drawl, of the immersion he undertook to nab the coveted lead in Luhrmann's big-budget gamble "Elvis." "I knew that the only way that I could do it was if I gave it everything that I had."
You'd still talk with a bit of the King's twang too if you went down the rabbit hole as far as Butler did. Before he could portray the American icon in a Warner Bros. production about Presley's life and legacy, he knew he had to become a student of all things Elvis. And to know
