'Elvis' Movie Star Austin Butler Reveals Emotional Response to Portraying King of Rock and Roll

On Thursday afternoon, Warner Bros. Pictures released the first full-length trailer for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, the highly-anticipated Elvis Presley biopic three years in the making. Leaving fans and critics alike all shook up over the upcoming summer release, Elvis illuminates various chapters of the rock icon's life through the eyes of his staunch and often vilified manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks. But as Austin Butler, who portrays the King of Rock and Roll himself, tells PopCulture and other media, the role really pushed him to take on numerous aspects of Elvis Presley, including the voice.

Revealing how he sings a lot of Presley's iconic songs in the Luhrmann-directed film due to the early recordings being in mono and the director working to avoid a "jukebox musical," Butler shares as he took on this role, Presley's were no doubt "huge shoes" to step into. "I think when I began the process of this, I set out to get my voice to sound identical to his," Butler said at the press conference on Feb. 7. "My goal is, if you heard a recording of me and you heard a recording of him, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and that, I held that for a long time."

Adding how it's that very element that "instills fear" for a sort of self-doubt, Butler admits it all culminated into a "fire burning" inside of him to work as hard as he could. "Maybe a year before we even started shooting, I was doing six, seven days a week of voice coaching and working with different experts and just trying to get registered to be in the right place and the dialect and the way his, he inflects and everything." 

Ultimately, Butler reveals it was the "life" of Presley that he wanted to prioritize for a role that respects the artist's greatest contribution to not just music, but a collective culture. "The life is what is important [and] what we sort of realized is, you can impersonate somebody, but to find his humanity and the life within and the passion and the heart," he said. "I had to release myself from the constraints of that and try to live the life as truthfully as possible."

Luhrmann says "getting inside the soul of a human being" like Elvis Presley prompted him and Butler to construct an "unusual language, a musical language" that found the 30-year-old actor singing all of the young Presley songs while blending the '60s Presley with Butler's voice and then as the director states, "when Elvis sings, 'In the Ghetto,' it's Elvis." The Moulin Rouge and Great Gatsby filmmaker adds the "thrilling" journey to get to such a point wouldn't be possible without the help of everyone at Graceland and the whole "Elvis world" as he puts it. "I had the privilege of, as the ultimate outsider, to be allowed into the world of Elvis. Eighteen months, I had a space on standby in the barn at Graceland, and to be in Nashville, Austin and I, in Elvis's actual recording studio with some of the greatest musicians in the world," he said. "A thing that became very clear was that as you got deep and deep and deep and deep into the research, the records that were Sun Records, the early recordings ... it's somewhat nostalgic."

As Butler's role of Elvis Presley is more of an interpretation than an impersonation, the actor admits it was an "incredible gift" to record with the gospel singers featured in the film. "The first time we walked into this little chapel and set up all these period microphones, and got to go in there with 30 of the most incredible gospel singers and they're stamping their feet and I've stood in the center and tears just poured down my face and I got chills down my spine," he said. "It's a glorious experience and it's hard not to have it in your marrow at that point. So it was experiences like that along the way that really showed me how much gospel and spirituals influenced Elvis on a musical level, on a spiritual level, on the way that he moved, on the freedom of his body and it was really beautiful."

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Dacre Montgomery and David Wenham. The movie opens on June 24 in theaters. For more on the Elvis Presley biopic, keep it locked to the latest from PopCulture.com.