Austin Butler is still adjusting to his post-Elvis life, and it sounds like he still can’t shake the voice. Ever since the Golden Globes, where Butler’s enduring Elvis accent became the talk of the night, the Internet has been obsessed. On Monday’s WTF with Marc Maron, the actor tried once again to explain his relationship with the King’s unmistakable drawl.
“I don’t even know how to talk about it,” Butler, who still sounded an awful lot like Presley in the podcast interview, told his host. “I spent three years doing nothing else but trying to understand [Elvis’s] mind and speak like him and sing like him. It was such an incredible focus in one direction.”
While preparing for and making Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, Butler went fully Method. As in, he’s said he did not see his family for three years while working on the film. (Is this commitment to the craft, or just indulgent? The Internet continues to discuss!) Now, Butler says that he might’ve attached certain sides of himself to his character.
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“Being such a shy kid, having the tools to get on a stage as Elvis, I had to learn certain bits of myself,” Butler told Maron. “So I think habitually, certain things are linked to a feeling of being able to go out in front of a ton of people. I think certain things might trigger that feeling of confidence that I had as Elvis.”
Say what you want about the methods Butler used to get there, but his Elvis performance has been nothing short of a phenomenon. For a while there, everyone on a certain corner of the Internet seemed to be thirsting after Butler’s Presley—even people who didn’t even like the movie. Earlier this month, after months of attempting to explain the accent, Butler shocked the nation by announcing his plans to get “rid of” it.
“But I have probably damaged my vocal cords with all that singing,” Butler added. “One song took 40 takes.”
Even so, the accent has remained at large. In fact, the husky twang was last spotted just one week ago during Butler’s episode of the YouTube series “Hot Ones.” Alas, old habits die hard. During their conversation, Butler and Maron likened the struggle to the way Al Pacino’s Scarface character, Tony Montana, seemed to stay with him for years after the film.
“It's only ever you, you know?” Butler told Maron. “You're turning up bits of yourself, and you're manipulating the architecture of your own mouth, and so it's a strange thing because you're finding different bits of yourself—and then suddenly you're going out into the world.”
