After more than a decade toiling as a child star and then teen-TV eye candy, Austin Butler leveled up dramatically with the title role in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic fantasia Elvis. The best-actor contender, who appears on our 2023 Hollywood cover, has a busy dance card, including the upcoming Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air and Dune: Part Two.
Vanity Fair: When you run into Selena Gomez or someone else you came up with, is there this moment of, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe we’re here now”?
Austin Butler: Yeah. When I was filming Elvis, Selena found this photograph of the two of us when I did a guest-star thing on her show Wizards of Waverly Place. And she sends it to me, just going, “Wow, remember this?” It feels like another life. When you’re a child actor, you see so many people come in from Texas or something, and at a certain point they may quit or go back. We’re just so fortunate to have careers in this industry for this amount of time.
Do you remember when you started on auditions as a teenager, what you thought your career would be like?
From the very beginning, when I first got on set, it was just a neat thing that I could do as a 12-year-old kid. Then once I started going to acting class and realized there’s a craft behind it—that sort of became this addiction for me. Addiction might be a strong word, but obsession with finding honesty, really.
I started looking at a lot of different people’s careers. And Leo, when I was about 15, became that guy, because he’d made that transition. Every film that he chose, you could see the level of passion that he still had for the work. And that’s been a surreal thing, looking back at what my dreams were when I was 15, and then getting to work with the people that he got to work with, getting to be on set with him. There’s a lot of these pinch-me moments in my life and that’s definitely one of them.
Coat by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; tank top by Calvin Klein; sunglasses by Gentle Monster x Moncler; necklace (top) and watch by Cartier; necklace by Lisa Eisner.PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVEN KLEIN; STYLED BY PATTI WILSON.
I love what Baz Luhrmann said about DiCaprio, that he was on a similar path to yours when Elvis came out, but that you being 30 would be a huge benefit for you. Did he tell you that too?
Yeah, he did. He said, “I think that it’s probably very healthy that this is happening now that you’re in your 30s.” I remember being younger, being 16 or something, and comparing myself to what I saw in Leo’s career when he was 19 or something, going from Gilbert Grape and Basketball Diaries and then Titanic. I was 20 and I was looking back and going, “Oh, no, my dreams are never going to come true in the same way.”
I mean, I had times where I just thought, Oh, maybe it’ll never happen or I’ll never get those opportunities. But now, in retrospect, I can look back and go, if I had some film that hit really big when I was younger, I wouldn’t have had to keep going back to the drawing board and saying, “How do you get better at this?”
