Austin Butler just can’t seem to ditch the Elvis Presley voice he picked up while starring in the upcoming Baz Luhrmann-biopic Elvis. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the actor responded to the widespread speculation about the way he’s speaking even off-camera after transforming himself into The King.
“At this point, I keep asking people, ‘Is this my voice?’ because this feels like my real … it’s one of those things where certain things trigger it and other times as well it’s, I don’t know,” Butler told the outlet. “When you live with something for two years, and you do nothing else, I think that you can’t help it. It becomes a fiber of your being.” Butler had to “work hard for” the movement that comes with Presley’s legacy as well, including his iconic hip movements. “The thing with him is they weren’t moves, they were coming out of the feel of the music,” he revealed. “So, for me, it had to be about finding the feeling of the music, moving me in that way. That was really fun. It was liberating.”
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The hardest part for Butler of becoming such a musical icon was finding the true person Presley was, not the idea or caricature of him created by the outside world. “There’s so many things out there that have become these caricatures, so even talking about him curling his lip, it’s something he didn’t do as much as we think he did,” Butler shared as an example. “He’d do it for a photo.” Making his performance both “subtle” and never losing Presley’s “soul” was the main goal for Butler, but there was a ton of pressure on his portrayal.
“What made me nervous was, Elvis was so loved and so iconic, you feel responsibility playing any human that has actually lived, but with him it’s like, it’s a weight like I never felt before,” he said. “And there’s a responsibility to his family and also putting his story into context. That’s the thing. There were so many misconceptions about him, there’s so many ideas of him. So I felt a responsibility to bring the humanity.” Elvis drops in theaters on June 24.
