Austin Butler Will Always Be Elvis | Extended Interview | The Graham Norton Show

Now, Ashley, you've been on the show before, but never the sofa. No, the first time on the sofa. We're all close. OK, yeah. Back off. And it's a first-time welcome to everybody else. Jack, Austin, Michelle. But presumably, Austin, Michelle, have you been meeting each other at all the kind of award shows and get-togethers and things like that? I keep seeing him on the stage. Yeah, I see him on the stage. Oh, my God, it's Austin! Oh, so is this the first time meeting? It's the first time we're meeting. Oh! Well, you'll have to say hello at the Oscars now that you know each other. Well, yes, hopefully we'll say hello. We'll do more than that, right? Well, no, because... ..being in Elvis, presumably you can never go on a dance floor again, because people will just be, here he goes, here he goes, have a look. Yeah, I watch a lot when dance floors are happening. You'll get past it, though. You'll get back on a dance floor, won't you? Well, I mean, I'm going to take some lessons with you and then I'll do a couple of different dance moves. I want some lessons with you! I never danced before. I was so, so self-conscious, so it really... It's opened up a lot. Now I, you know, it's... I find a lot of joy when I listen to music in a way that I didn't before. OK. So if you're alone, do you dance? Yeah. OK, good. That sounds about right. Or if I'm at a party where nobody has cell phones. Ah! One of those good parties. What's that about? You guys, you've seen this, haven't you? Yeah, it's just insane. I just fast forward too often. Now you can, yeah. And we saw Tom Hanks there playing Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker. What a legend. But this is your first big role as a very experienced actor. Did he feel responsibility to you, or did you just go, this is your moment, you go, you shine? Well, I had no idea what it was going to be like. You know, whenever you meet somebody that you admired for a long time, you hope that they're going to be warm to you, but you never really know. And somebody like Tom, he's been doing this for so long, and he's such a master of his craft, so I was intimidated. And then the first time that I met him, Baz had this little house in Australia along this riverbank. And so I came, and I knew I was going to be meeting Tom for the first time. I walked through the house and see Tom and Baz down by the river. And I come walking up, and Tom turns around and he sees me, and he goes, my boy, give me a hug. And he gives me the biggest bear hug. Oh, my God. And then Baz said, you know, let me give you guys a moment. And so Baz went into the house, and Tom and I just talked for so long. And at one point he said, you know, I was at the studio earlier today, and I was choosing which doors I was going to throw up outside of for the first couple weeks. And I said, why, are you nervous? And he goes, oh, yeah, I'm so nervous. I said, you're nervous? I'm terrified. And he goes, nobody knows what Colonel Parker sounds like. I said, everyone knows what Elvis sounds like. Suddenly we were colleagues, you know. We were both able to share in our fear, and we were joined in that way. And I heard you talking about, I think it was quite early on in the process, where you kind of connected to Elvis through your mothers. Yeah, yeah. But that was the thing, you know, when you approach somebody like Elvis Presley, he's so much larger than life, you know. And he's either a Halloween costume in certain people's minds, or you have people who go to the house that he was born in, and they kiss the floor when they come inside. So he almost becomes raised to the level of a deity in certain people's minds. But for me, I knew that I needed to find the humanity in him. So I was really, when I started doing research, just trying to find whatever key it was into who he was as a human being. And I was watching a documentary where I learned that his mom passed away when he was 23, and I was 23 when my mom died. And so it was suddenly in that moment, he ceased being this icon, Elvis Presley, and I knew what it felt like at that age to lose your best friend, to lose your mother. Yeah. And so that was the first key in, you know. And anyone who's seen the movie, I don't know how many of you have, will know that you leave this movie feeling like you've seen Elvis in concert. It's just, I've never seen anything like it. And I remember when I talked to you, Christopher Cahn, the Elvis voice was still very present in your voice. And people have talked about that. But I think there's a lot less of it now. I'm glad you say that. I hear it all the time. So do you think, will it eventually go, have you tried to get rid of it? Have you gone to a speech therapist or anything? No. What did you sound like before? Well, I don't know. People pull clips from when I was 17. So you talk like that. And it's really, I mean, to be honest, I've really, I heard my publicist told me the other day, you know, people are, I try to stay off social media. So my publicist told me, you know, people are talking about your voice and these sorts of things. And it really made me self-conscious for a second, because I thought, am I being phony? Is this not my voice? And then I thought, no, I'd have to think consciously to not talk how I am right now. But my voice sounds different when I talk to my dog or when I talk to my dad or when I'm here right now. You know, we all have different bits of ourselves that we're releasing. But when I was really questioning it, I thought, okay, for one thing, I'm older now. I don't, maybe sometimes I have a Southern twang, but I'm not, I don't think this is Southern. If I tried to sound like Elvis, I would sound very different right now. Don't do it. Yeah, I'm not going to. You'd have to pay extra for that. But the other thing is, I think I, from all the singing, I probably have destroyed my voice a bit. You know, my vocal cords, it's a lot raspier now. And so I just trained a lot, you know, I trained a lot. And then it turned out that I ended up doing all the singing for that early stuff. And it's so good, it's so good. I think people kind of raised eyebrows and went, is it really him? So Baz Luhrmann released this clip of, this is you rehearsing Jailhouse Rock. Oh wow. So is that you kind of just channeling Elvis, or how studied is that? Like, you know, even things like the microphone lead and stuff, is that all watching footage? Yeah, it's, well, it's that really tricky, I often call it a tightrope, because you can fall either way. Either you go into just focusing on everything meticulous, like, so that is, you know, the microphone, all that's meant to be that way. But it's so tricky when you, and I was interested in asking you about this, when you're dealing with something that you want to be very specific, but it's got to feel as though it's happening for the first time. Yeah. And so there was many times, thankfully I had a year and a half to prepare. And so there was many times where it felt completely external. And then you've got to be able to figure out the ways in which it can come from the inside out. Yeah. So it's all about coming back. And Baz Luhrmann, the way he makes films, they're so visually arresting and stunning. So you make the film, and then the first time you see it is in Cannes with an audience. Yeah. Was it at all what you expected? Or were you shocked by it? You never know how a film, we were talking about this before, you just never know how a film was going to be received. And so I had no idea. And Baz told me early on, you know, you can never predict the outcome, but what we can do is relish in the process. So the entire time we just tried to keep our mind off of the fact that anybody would ever see the film, and instead just go for truth every day and just give everything that you had at every moment. But then there's that moment where you're sitting in the theatre and you go, oh God, we're going to watch this with everybody and you just hope that you captured something. Yeah. And everybody else had seen it, but I waited for Cannes. Will you ever do that again? It seems like a really dumb idea. Yeah, I mean, it worked out all right, but it was nerve-wracking. But it was so special because my dad was there. My dad had never been outside the country before. Oh, wow. And he rented a tuxedo, so he had his bow tie. Oh, wow. I'm in the Palais with my dad, and it was just, it was really surreal. And then you get Don and Guillermo del Toro's there clapping, and it's just those surreal moments that you've got to pinch yourself and just be so grateful for. Ashley, we've seen you now, we've seen you on panels, you know, doing other work, what we call sitting-down jobs. LAUGHTER Are you embracing the sitting-down jobs, or have you got an exit strategy, I suppose? I realised this recently that the recent jobs that I'm doing, they are all sitting down. Nice, isn't it? Apart from this tour, yeah, literally. So I suppose a tour that's like 90 shows long, it honestly genuinely is frightening. So I would just advise anybody, if you do buy tickets, just come to the earlier shows. And then the later ones, they probably won't be worth coming to. Can you give us a taste of your dancing now? Give you a taste? Yeah. Do you know what, can I say something? I really want to learn that sidewinder move that you did in that clip. Oh! You dug in side to side, and I was like, if I can learn that from you, that would be... Oh, jeez. But you've got the shoes for it. So, I mean, I can try to. Woo-hoo! Boots are hard to do it in, but you'll be better. You've got the shoes. But essentially, it's to the side. It's hard on heels, cos you always lose balance. OK. But essentially, it's... Ooh! Yeah.