When director Baz Luhrmann set out to make his 2022 film Elvis, he had a problem that sinks most music biopics. He needed somebody who could make an audience forget they were watching an actor.
He found Austin Butler. And the way Butler won the role says more about what he brought to it than any review.
He sent Luhrmann a video of himself sitting at a piano, singing “Unchained Melody.” He was not performing an impression. Butler had lost his own mother in his early twenties — and Elvis had lost Gladys at 23. He poured that into the song. Luhrmann has said that grief, not the resemblance, convinced him.
How Austin Butler Prepared to Play Elvis
Then came the work, and it was total. Butler spent around two years studying Elvis — the voice, the walk, the way he held a microphone, the way he glanced at a crowd. He watched the footage obsessively. And he did not stop when the cameras did.
That is why scenes like “A Little Less Conversation” land the way they do. The tilt of the head, the rhythm of the steps, the glance at the room — none of it looks rehearsed. It looks instinctive. For a few minutes, the actor simply disappears.
Austin Butler on Intense Elvis Preparation, Singing in the Movie
It cost him physically. The day after filming wrapped, his body gave out, and he ended up in hospital. And the voice stayed. For a long time afterward, people noticed Elvis’s Southern drawl still sitting in Butler’s speech — so deeply had he lived inside it.
What he took from the man was not the swagger. It was the tenderness. Butler has spoken about Elvis’s vulnerability, his love for his mother, his loneliness underneath the fame — the parts the world tends to forget.
The film earned him a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination. But the review that mattered most came from the family. Priscilla and Lisa Marie both praised him, and Lisa Marie said watching it was so emotional she needed time to process it.
He did not look like Elvis. He made people feel like they were watching him.