Austin Butler stares into the lens. The ring light circling the camera shines into his eyes, making him squint a little. High, rounded cheekbones cast a shadow to a smudge of stubble that frames a face Michelangelo might have carved. He tousles his hair, which remains an implausibly buoyant pile reminiscent of a mid-1950s James Dean or early-1990s River Phoenix.
It’s April 22, 2022, and Butler is listening to my question about playing the title role in Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis. His performance will take him from being known as an ensemble player in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and “that guy who played Carrie’s boyfriend” on the Sex and the City spin-off The Carrie Diaries, onto Time magazine’s list of the Top 100 Most Influential People of 2023.
“Extreme fame can warp reality and for him, I think it changed the way he saw himself,” Butler says in a quiet, clear voice. “Elvis’s story is a cautionary tale of asking yourself the right questions about how you stay present and grounded and realise that fame is not real. It’s this thing that’s separate from who you actually are. You need to maintain that distance and keep a perspective on things that really matter. For me,” he says, with the beginning of a laugh, “that’s staying off social media. I don’t find that helpful at all.”
Two years later, Butler has a slew of awards for playing Presley and received his greatest acclaim yet for his scene-stealing performance as the porcelain-skinned Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two. The distance and perspective Butler spoke about has manifested as an immersive approach to his roles, which he moves through at an almost unhealthy pace.
When Butler talks about his performances, it is with a fervent dedication to research and preparation. He and his acting teacher of 10 years, Howard Fine, focus on acquiring skills and drawing on real-life experiences, an evolution of the method-acting technique mythologised by actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.
Preparation for Elvis focused on rigorous study of his real-life subject to find “the humanity of him”, rather than pulling off an impersonation. Dune: Part Two saw him spend months developing his character’s voice and skill at martial arts, leading him to become proficient in kali, a Philippine stick-fighting style. Days after finishing production on the science fiction epic, Butler began readying himself for a very different film: Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders.
Nichols’s adrenalised drama is based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photobook of the same name. The book combines intimate photographs of the Chicago-based motorbike club the Outlaws and interviews with the riders and their partners. Their stories are full of injustice, rejection and violence – testament to the personal cost of being a white working-class rebel in the American Midwest. In Nichols’s film, the gang is fictionalised as the Vandals and Butler plays Benny, “a lone wolf who craves togetherness”.
Benny’s introduction comes as Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, scans the biker bar in which she has inadvertently found herself. Her gaze settles on a figure in the corner, his head down, a cut-off denim jacket revealing muscular arms, hands gripping the edge of a pool table. In slow motion, Benny tilts his head back and lets the light reveal his face. Within minutes Kathy is sharing the seat of his Harley-Davidson, the night air rushing past her, breathing in the scent of his jacket.
“The closest thing we have to Benny is images in a book and none of them are of his face, so he’s this enigma,” Butler says. To find the character, Butler began by focusing on Benny’s connection to his bike. After learning to deconstruct and reconstruct his character’s motorcycle, a 1965 Harley-Davidson Panhead, Butler rode all he could. “Every decision you make on a motorcycle, you’re the only one who can make it,” he says. “The feeling that your life is in your hands gives you a feeling of control over your own life.”
Butler’s instructor and mentor was the film’s stunt coordinator, Jeff Milburn. Milburn expands on Butler’s sense of connection by linking the feeling of freedom that comes with motorcycle riding in the aftermath of World War II, when young men who had often narrowly escaped death returned home to the United States eager to live a full life and yearning for a sense of mastery over it.
“Austin is an unbelievably good student,” Milburn says. “Within 20 minutes of meeting him I realised he didn’t want to fake it, he wanted to be good. He listens to what you’re saying. Austin and [Australian actor] Toby [Wallace] would come early, train all day and we’d end up going out on the roads at night, something we were absolutely not supposed to do. Other actors, and I won’t name names, expected things, they came with a sense of entitlement. Austin wasn’t like that at all.”
If there is anything you know about Butler outside of his acting, it is likely to be his adoption of Presley’s voice during the promotion of Elvis. To the outsider, it seemed his natural voice had been permanently altered. Butler puts this down to the intense preparation he did in the months before filming and the rigours of its year-long production. When he began work on the miniseries Masters of the Air, weeks after he finished Elvis, he employed a dialect coach to help him lose Presley’s voice and recover his own. For The Bikeriders, he spent time with Milburn, riding the back roads of the Midwest, learning how to move in a tight pack with the other riders, a phalanx of Brandos.
Three of Butler’s past four roles – Elvis, Masters of the Air and The Bikeriders – embody an archetypal white mid-20th-century masculinity, a man better able to express himself with a persona, a plane or a motorbike than with language. Butler seems surprised when shown the commonalities between these performances.
Their appeal, he tells me, lay in their differences as well as the directors’ approaches to filmmaking and the stories themselves. In the case of The Bikeriders, it was the chance to do “something more raw and stripped back”, a film that tapped into his love of Easy Rider and stylish action movies of the 1960s. We reflect on that era and what those roles say about men at that time compared with how they play today, before I ask him what he thinks a modern version of good masculinity looks like. There is a long pause.
“I can only speak from my own experience, I guess,” he says, his voice rough from the silence. “When I was a kid, one of my acting teachers said to me, ‘You can’t be self-conscious and other-conscious at the same time.’ That completely shifted how I felt in social settings. Even today if I start to feel self-conscious, I’ll just put my attention on the other person and be very curious about them. So, my male friends are very different from each other, but I think the through line is kindness. They want to make the world feel safer in some way. To be solid and hold space for people and be able to be vulnerable. That’s my experience, with my groups of friends.”
Butler’s experience is unusual. Born and raised in Anaheim, California, the actor was yet to turn 10 when he had his first experience on a set. Since then, he has rarely spent any time away from one. “I sort of stumbled into it,” he says. “I met somebody who said, ‘Do you want to come and be an extra on a TV show?’, and that’s how I got into being on my first set. At the time, I was a really shy kid, I wasn’t into sports, and I didn’t feel at home around all these outgoing kids at school. Being on a film set with artists and kids who were more vulnerable and who liked to play the guitar and who I could talk to about movies, that helped break me out of my shell. My parents saw this passion start to blossom and they were incredibly supportive.”
Soon Butler was being homeschooled and driven to acting classes and auditions by his mother. He was given parts in children’s television series such as Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place, roles Butler credits as being crucially formative. “Those experiences helped me to learn how to express emotions that I learned to repress,” he says. “Then it was just a matter of realising there was craft behind it and you can get better, and I fell in love with that.”
Many of Butler’s scenes in The Bikeriders are taut with repressed feelings. Kathy speaks openly about her disgust for and fascination with the Vandals, yet there are few moments in which the largely male cast share their thoughts. There is an absurdity to the masculinity she sees: having rejected the rules that society sought to impose on them, they rebel by establishing a subculture with arcane rules they follow with puritanical solemnity. In an early scene, Benny drives Kathy home and wordlessly waits outside her house, leaning against his motorbike, smoking cigarette after cigarette for nearly 24 hours, until the pusillanimous boyfriend she is living with leaves.
“I remember years ago seeing this great interview with Christian Bale where he talked about playing a silent character,” says Butler. “He talked about how he writes out the dialogue that isn’t said. If someone is silent there isn’t an absence of thought, you just have fewer clues into what their thought process is. That helped me so much.”
In 2014, just before Butler flew to New Zealand to film the young adult fantasy series The Shannara Chronicles, his mother died from duodenal cancer. The experience of spending time in hospital at first caused him to question his chosen profession. After six months of “a deep, dark depression”, Butler credits the experience of starring in The Iceman Cometh on Broadway alongside Denzel Washington for reigniting his love of the craft. When Baz Luhrmann called Washington to ask him his opinion of Butler and whether he thought the young actor could shoulder the lead role in Elvis, it was Washington’s endorsement that set him on his new path, which has kept him in the spotlight ever since.
“At times it does feel that there is a pressure for me to maintain a particular profile, then at other times…” Butler trails off. “I feel more of a responsibility to everybody involved in a film and to the studio. Once I’m acting it doesn’t feel that way, because you’re present, you’re in the moment.
“One of the joys of having acting as a job is you’re trying to see the world through other people’s eyes all the time. Curiosity is really one of the core elements in it. Trying to figure out, ‘How do you see the world? What makes you feel sad and what makes you feel happy? What do you believe?’ I think it just makes me love humans more and more.”
As Butler’s friend and confidant, Milburn has a different perspective. “With Austin, everybody wants a piece of him all the time, you know? When we do events together, promoting the film, they’re full of people telling him what to do the whole time, ‘You have to be here now’, ‘You have to do this’, it’s a lot of work. But as soon as we finish and we’re outside on our bikes, about to head into Los Angeles traffic and split lanes, he’s happy. He’s free.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
June 29, 2024 as “Hitting the apex”.
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