Austin Butler Is a Hunk of Burning Love
There are an estimated 400,000 Elvis Presley impersonators worldwide who devote themselves to shimmying into rhinestone jumpsuits and slicking their hair back and swiveling their hips. Who, night after night, croon “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender,” and pronounce you man and wife and put on their best Southern drawl to thank you, thank you very much. There is perhaps no other person in human history who has been imitated and idolized as much as Elvis. In the face of the King’s omnipresence, how can a performer who is met with the task of portraying Elvis make it feel…real? After all, even footage of the actual man can feel uncanny, as if he, too, is yet another impersonator playing up the tropes.
Now, Austin Butler is taking on the challenge of trying to resurrect him for the Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis. If Elvis was a polite, handsome, and talented young interloper in the world of music, then Butler is a polite, handsome, and talented young interloper in the world of Elvis interpreters. For starters, the 30-year-old actor looks as if he’s been transported to our interview—at a convivial Los Angeles restaurant where the owners treat him like family—on a ray of California sunshine. He’s tall, with a face meant to be ripped out of a magazine and taped up in a locker: blue-green eyes, a lock of sandy blond hair that falls over his forehead, lips so pillowy they might as well be memory foam. When he smiles, it is the most earnest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. And if you are within Austin Butler’s vicinity, there is, statistically speaking, a 98 percent chance he is smiling right at you. Even when he’s saying things like: “You can lose touch with who you actually are. And I definitely had that when I finished Elvis—not knowing who I was.”
His friends say he really is that unflaggingly upbeat. On the set of the upcoming Apple TV+ drama, Masters of the Air, in which Butler plays a World War II fighter pilot, there was one guy who would do a warm imitation of him, punctuating everything with "Beautiful! Excellent!"
