Wait…is that really how he talks?
So thought—or texted, Slacked to colleagues, or said out loud to an empty living room—just about everyone who tuned into the Golden Globe Awards Tuesday night, as actor Austin Butler accepted the Best Actor trophy for playing Elvis Presley while speaking as if he was impersonating the King in a sad revue on the Vegas strip. My own boyfriend, who had never heard a word out of Butler’s mouth, made a queasy face. “Oh, that’s what he sounds like?”
To play someone as iconic as Elvis Presley, you’ve got to nail the specifics. You can’t be a convincing King if you’re not performing, walking, and talking exactly like him. The hips have to roll, the muted swagger has to flow, and that infamous Southern drawl has to roll out slower than molasses.
Austin Butler clearly understood that if he could perfect these nuances, he may land the role of a lifetime in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, Elvis. After all, he’d been hustling in the industry since he was a teenager without ever landing a memorable role (unless you count 26 episodes of The Carrie Diaries, which no one does). Is it really so surprising that someone would want to be known as more than the boyfriend who carried Vanessa Hudgens’ appropriated bindis around Coachella?
So, Butler became one with Elvis. He worked with vocal coaches to nail Elvis’ distinct voice and movement coaches to mime the hip thrusts that made concertgoers go weak. And he did it with staggering authenticity. At least, that’s what I’m told. I still haven’t seen the film; if I wanted to see Baz Luhrmann work out his boyhood sexual frustrations on screen, I’d watch Hugh Jackman’s shower scene in Australia on YouTube like a normal, well-adjusted person.
And Butler took home the Golden Globe for his portrayal, so he was surely doing something right. There’s just one thing that can’t stop following him around as he jets between countries on an endless promo tour leading up to his inevitable Oscar race: That goddamn voice! Sir, the movie is over. Why are you still speaking that way?
Before Elvis was even released last June, people online had been noticing that Butler had packed up his Elvis affectation and taken it with him after production wrapped. “Austin Butler doing all his interviews in an Elvis impersonation voice is soooo funny, he wants that Oscar so badly!” one Twitter user observed back in May.
And at yesterday’s Golden Globe Awards—a whopping 22 months after Elvis wrapped in March 2021—Butler accepted the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama. To no one’s surprise, the voice followed him onstage. “AUSTIN BUTLER, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, WE KNOW WHAT YOU [REALLY] SOUND LIKE,” one user commented, posting an old clip from Butler’s brief stint on Zoey 101.
Backstage, one of the industry’s most intrepid journalists was kind enough to perform a public service and ask Butler why it is that he—a California boy—has been talking in a deep Southern accent for the better part of two years. “I don’t even think about it, I don’t think I sound like him still,” Butler responded, fibbing through perfect teeth. “I guess I must, because I hear it a lot.
“I often liken it to when somebody lives in another country for a long time,” he continued. “I had three years where that was my only focus in life, so I’m sure that there [are] just pieces of my DNA that will always be linked to that point.”
Butler may have a point here. I spent a good chunk of quarantine 2020 in Paramus (via watching countless episodes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey) and emerged from my Brooklyn apartment when stay-at-home orders lifted with a distinct Teresa Giudice screech. All great acteurs are eventually vulnerable to coming down with the horrible virus of Attention-Itis, the symptoms of which include adopting a strange voice for years to stay relevant in the press. Who can forget when Lindsay Lohan emerged one day in 2016 with a random transatlantic-by-way-of-Turkey accent and kept it until her rickety beach club blew away in the Grecian winds three years later?
But even Lohan is talking normally again! The only affectations left in her voice are the result of a natural rasp and years of Marlboro inhalation. How long can Austin Butler keep this ruse up? With such major attention toward his voice happening on social media every time he opens his mouth, he may have committed himself to this for the rest of his life, lest he be taken to task by the Twitterati. And for an actor who only just managed to claw his way out of teen drama obscurity, that could mean a sentence worse than death: working with Damien Chazelle!
Yet, there is something to be said about being hot with a mysterious, low voice. No doubt Butler got a taste of what it was like to command audiences with that drawl while filming as Elvis. As a natural performer, why not keep it for a while? For him, it’ll be like wearing a hat you really like for a long time, and then waking up one day to realize you wore it out, thankful for all of the suitors that bold fashion statement attracted. But there’s no doubt that day will come sometime after Oscar Sunday in March. Like Elvis, Butler evidently intends to take this all the way to the top.
