Austin Butler really went all in to become Elvis! Here are the craziest things he did to get into character:
Austin actually began preparing for the role before he was even cast. He hired a movement coach, a dialect coach, and a singing coach as soon as he heard the movie was in the pipeline.
When he sent an audition tape through to Baz Luhrmann, the director wondered whether he was having a breakdown. Even then, it was five months of Austin trying things out with Luhrmann before he even got to do a screen test.
Once he had it, the intensity didn’t let up. He watched every Elvis film, listened to tapes of Elvis’ voice as he was falling asleep, created an archive of “how he said every word”, as a kind of Elvis vocal manual.
He studied tap-dancing and swing to try and mimic Elvis’ signature physicality. And so intense was his preparation that he crashed hard. He was hospitalized for a week immediately after filming, and may have done irreparable damage to his vocal cords from all the singing.
Talk about suffering for your art… but in this case, it might have been worth it!