Screen Elvis: I didn’t want to let him down
With a string of bit-parts in children shows and a cameo as a cowboy cultist in a Quentin Tarantino movie, Austin Butler wasn’t the first choice to be cast as Elvis.
Yet a stunning audition tape left director Baz Luhrmann moved enough to give the unknown actor the role of the rock’n’roll icon in the movie, which is released on Friday.
“I got this tape of this young guy playing Unchained Melody and crying,” said Luhrmann. “It was just strange. It was so moving. I thought, ‘This isn’t really acting’. Now I learned years later that it was Austin thinking about his mother.”
Like The King, Butler’s mother died when he was 23, which he believes gives the pair a connection. And after preparing for the part day and night for over a year he struggled to cope with the weight of playing a cultural touchstone.
“I don’t want to let myself down, I don’t want to let Elvis down – I want to do him justice,” said Butler, 30. “So even on a very personal level, having to push through that every day and use it, use the fear where I’d wake up at 4am every morning with my heart pounding...i’d just be terrified and I’d go, ‘OK, use that fear as energy and get to work’. It gave me this drive. The person I am today is different (to the one) before I started this.”
Butler admitted he was in crisis. He was hospitalised for a week with a virus the day after filming concluded.
“I remember the day I wrapped, I went back to my trailer and I started crying,” explained Butler. “I had this moment where I kept repeating in my mind, ‘Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?’
“I was weeping because I had been living within and with him and suddenly I was going, ‘OK, how do I adjust to reality at this point?’
“So after that it’s just been a process of shedding, in a way. But what a joy to get to explore him for that time.”