Austin Butler

Info

Full Name: Austin Robert Butler
Date of birth: August 17, 1991 (35 years old)
Location: Anaheim, California
Country: USA
Height: 1,83m

Austin Butler has been active for 19 years, participating in 9 movies that average a 6.7/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

At the BAFTAs in February 2023, Austin Butler won Best Actor for playing Elvis Presley and used his speech to thank the Presley family. Lisa Marie Presley had died five weeks earlier, and she had spent the previous year telling anyone who asked that he had embodied her father beautifully. It was the biggest night of a career he had come close to giving up on eight years before.

He was born on 17 August 1991 in Anaheim, California, the younger of two, and his parents separated when he was seven. At thirteen a background casting agent stopped him at the Orange County Fair and asked whether he had ever thought about being an extra. He left public school in seventh grade, carried on at home so he could work, and gave up on schooling altogether after tenth grade once he had passed the state exam that counts as a leaving certificate in California. He taught himself guitar at thirteen and piano at sixteen.

What followed was the full American children's television apprenticeship. He started as an extra on 'Drake & Josh' and 'Unfabulous', got a regular part on 'Ned's Declassified', then worked his way through the schedule: an episode of 'Hannah Montana', one of 'iCarly', the boyfriend in the last season of 'Zoey 101' and a marching band boy in 'Wizards of Waverly Place'. His first film was 'Aliens in the Attic' in 2009.

Teen drama came next and kept him in constant work without getting him noticed: 'Life Unexpected', 'Switched at Birth', the bad boy Sebastian Kydd in 'The Carrie Diaries', three episodes of 'Arrow', and the lead in 'The Shannara Chronicles' in 2016.

Then, on 12 September 2014, his mother Lori died at 50. He was 23. She was the one who had driven him to auditions since he was a boy, and losing her nearly took him out of the business. He stopped working for months and seriously considered quitting. He has said since that he now lives this life for the two of them.

The way back came through the stage. In 2018 he made his Broadway debut as Don Parritt in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's 'The Iceman Cometh', opposite Denzel Washington. Within a year Quentin Tarantino had cast him as the Manson Family killer Tex Watson in 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' (2019) and Jim Jarmusch had put him in 'The Dead Don't Die' (2019) with Bill Murray and Adam Driver.

Elvis, and a voice that would not go away

Washington had also done something Butler knew nothing about at the time. Having just shared a stage with him, he cold called Baz Luhrmann, a man he had never met, to tell him about this young actor.

The audition itself has become famous. Butler had a nightmare in which he blew the whole thing, woke up thinking about his mother, and filmed himself on his phone at home in a dressing gown, unshaven and in tears, singing 'Unchained Melody'. Luhrmann watched it and said he had to meet him. Two years of preparation followed, and by the end of the shoot the crew were calling him Elvis off camera.

He does his own singing in 'Elvis' (2022), up to a point. Everything before 1968 is his voice; from the leather suit comeback special onwards the film switches to Presley's own recordings, spliced with Butler's breaths and grunts. Opposite Tom Hanks, buried under prosthetics as Colonel Parker, he carries nearly three hours almost single handed.

He won the Golden Globe and the BAFTA, went into the Oscars as a lot of people's favourite, and lost Best Actor to Brendan Fraser for 'The Whale'. That same year he made the Time 100 and was invited to join the Academy.

The odd bit came afterwards. For months he kept speaking in Presley's low, slow drawl, and had to hire a dialect coach to get rid of it. His voice coach put it well: he had cut that groove so deep that the accent kept wanting to come out and play.

An English airfield, a bald cap and a Chicago motorcycle club

He spent much of 2022 in Britain making 'Masters of the Air', the Apple TV+ war series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. He played Major Gale Cleven, a B-17 pilot with the 100th Bomb Group flying out of Norfolk, and almost all of it was shot in England: the airfield sequences at former RAF Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, the base itself rebuilt from photographs at Dalton Barracks in Oxfordshire. Callum Turner, Barry Keoghan and Anthony Boyle flew alongside him.

In 'Dune: Part Two' (2024) he is Feyd-Rautha, the Harkonnen heir, hairless and pale opposite Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Stellan Skarsgård as his uncle the Baron. Contrary to a story that went round at the time, he never shaved his head or his eyebrows. It was a bald cap and up to five hours in the chair every day, because he had another film waiting the moment Denis Villeneuve released him.

That film was 'The Bikeriders', Jeff Nichols's adaptation of Danny Lyon's photographs of a Chicago motorcycle club. Butler is Benny, wanted in different ways by Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy. Disney dropped it from its schedule during the writers' and actors' strikes and it didn't reach cinemas until June 2024, picked up by another distributor.

Two very different parts followed in 2025. Ari Aster gave him a conspiracy guru in 'Eddington', a small role that decides a lot, in a Cannes competition film with Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. Then he led 'Caught Stealing' for Darren Aronofsky, with Zoë Kravitz and Regina King. Critics liked it, cinemas ignored it, and it then did very well on streaming.

Private life, and a diary that will not close

He gives away very little. He was with the actress Vanessa Hudgens from 2011 until January 2020, close to nine years, and then with the model Kaia Gerber from late 2021 until they separated at the end of 2024. No partner has been public since, and he has said more than once that he would rather his private life stayed that way.

The work diary is another matter. He has a 'Miami Vice' reboot lined up with Michael B. Jordan for Joseph Kosinski, will play Lance Armstrong for Edward Berger in an Apple film, and is in the cast of the western Park Chan-Wook is putting together with Matthew McConaughey, Pedro Pascal and Tang Wei. There is also a thriller called 'Enemies' sitting in post production.

So how do you follow Elvis? His answer so far has been to make sure no two jobs look anything like each other, which is a strange strategy for someone who spent more than a decade being cast as the good looking boyfriend.