Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is officially in the building and has viewers all shook up! On Thursday afternoon, Warner Bros. released the highly-anticipated first full-length trailer for the Elvis Presley biopic starring Austin Butler in the title role and Tom Hanks as the often-vilified Colonel Tom Parker. Opening the trailer to the classic “Suspicious Minds” echoing across a shot of Butler’s Elvis as Hanks narrates, the film’s trailer dazzlingly highlights Presley’s life as a young boy fascinated with gospel church music in Tupelo to his seemingly last days as a rock legend in Memphis. Through the lens of Hanks’ Tom Parker who admits in a voiceover that there are “some who make [him] out to be the villain,” we learn the Dutch-born manager sought Elvis out after watching him perform, transforming a local singer into the world-famous artist he is even after his death in 1977.
While Butler’s Elvis transformation is mind-blowing to see and one that is eerily uncanny to the King’s as the Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood actor nailed the drawl, mannerisms and look, it’s Academy Award winner Hanks’ dramatic and unrecognizable appearance that will no doubt throw fans off. In a press conference with PopCulture.com and other media on Feb. 7, Luhrmann revealed it was a role that Hanks “ran towards” because it was so different and complex.
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“It’s interesting because a villain is too easy to wrap it up,” he told PopCulture and other media adding how the trailer opening with Hanks’ narration as Tom Parker was intentional and open to interpretation. “[Tom Parker] tells the story. He doesn’t go on to tell the story that says ‘And they’re right.’ From that character’s point of view, he’s defending actually that story. It’s a device and it’s a device, because in truth when it comes to a historical character, there’s only ever somebody’s telling of that story. Even in life. If you lived with an Elvis or you lived with an Amadeus — it’s your memory, your version of their life. And people always tell the story of someone else from a perspective that is their telling.”
Further revealing how he wanted to do an Elvis Presley movie because the icon’s life could not have been a “better canvas on which to explore America” between the ’50s to ’70s, Luhrmann states it’s somewhat of a “mythical” existence that the King of Rock and Roll lived out. Despite his death at 42, Luhrmann states there were “three great lives put into a short period of time” that reflected Presley’s personal evolution culturally at the center of the 1950s and socially during the 1960s and 1970s.
With the focus on Butler though as Elvis Presley in the Warner Bros. Pictures feature film out this summer, the 30-year-old actor believes his role as the iconic singer “can’t be an impersonation, it’s got to be an interpretation” as reiterated by Luhrmann during the press conference. “Because we don’t have the source material and even if we did, it’s filtered through old nostalgic technology,” the director said. “Austin’s number one mission from the moment I met him was to humanize Elvis Presley — was to show the person on the journey.”
Butler, who is best known for his roles in The Dead Don’t Die, The Carrie Diaries and Life Unexpected, told PopCulture and other media that “getting to explore the humanity” of an individual like Elvis Presley was a humbling honor. “He’s become the wallpaper of society in a way and he’s such an icon and he is held up to a superhuman status, so to get to explore that for years now and learn why he was the way that he was and find the human within that icon, that was really just such a joy that I could do it for the rest of my life, probably. But that paired with the fact that I get to work with one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. I mean, this is just the joy of my lifetime.”
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis stars Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Dacre Montgomery and David Wenham. The movie opens on June 24 in theaters.
