Austin Butler
Speech coach helped him stop sounding like Elvis
It wasn’t that easy to get Elvis out of Austin Butler.
© Ovidiu Hrubaru/Shutterstock
Austin Butler leaves “Elvis” behind and reorients himself with a new war series. He got help from a language coach.
Life as an actor has its share of pitfalls: Austin Butler (32), for example, was so absorbed in his Elvis role that he had problems slipping into a new one afterwards. Butler even hired a language teacher for this, as he now reported on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”.
In the show, the Oscar-nominated actor said that after three years of “Elvis” he had difficulty getting rid of the dialect he had trained for. “I had a dialect coach who was just there to help me stop sounding like Elvis,” Butler said.
Austin Butler: Three years in “Elvis Land”
Butler’s accent caused excitement among fans of the film when it was released in 2022. He was also a topic at the Golden Globes in 2023, where he was awarded best actor for his interpretation of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll Elvis Presley (1935-1977). Backstage Butler explained, according to The Hollywood Reporterthat he would still be asked about it often. “I often compare it to someone who lives in another country for a long time and I had three years where I only focused on that country.”
Austin also spoke to Stephen Colbert (59) about the challenge of distancing himself from Elvis again. “I was just trying to remember who I was,” he said. “I tried to remember what I liked to do.” The solution, so to speak, was Butler’s next role, which he got through Tom Hanks (67): In the Apple TV+ war series “Masters of the Air” he plays the leader of the Eighth Air Force, which flew air raids on Germany during World War II.
Headfirst into the next role
It was also Hanks who advised him over dinner to find a new obsession after the intense “Elvis” years. This time too, Butler plunged headfirst into the new role: “And then I had a week off and flew to London, there was Covid at the time, so I was in quarantine for ten days.” During this time he put all his energy into “learning everything about the Second World War.”