Austin Butler drives Greg Williams back home.

So how long ago were you last outside your house? Probably about 20. What are we doing today? Well today, what are we doing today? Today we're driving down to, we're driving down to my hometown of Anaheim and we're gonna, we're gonna go to my elementary school and then something that you told me is that we're gonna get to see my teachers that I haven't seen in the same amount of time. So my kindergarten teacher, my first grade teacher and my fourth grade teacher. That's surreal. So yeah, I'm excited to go down. Dude, I'm excited to be recording it. Yeah. Thank you. I'm excited to spend the day with you. So we're heading down to Anaheim where you grew up. We're heading to Anaheim. Have you ever been down there? Never. Well, you know, I went to Disneyland once, so I would have gone past it. Yeah, that's, we're not going to Disneyland today. I sort of grew up between two theme parks. You got Knott's Berry Farm and you have Disneyland. And when I was homeschooled, my mom would take me out of school for the day and then just go to one of the theme parks. I first worked in New York when I was about 20 years old and that was the first time I'd ever lived in New York. And in LA, theater wasn't a part of the culture. But in New York, I started watching plays and I saw Mark Rylance on stage and I saw these just incredible performances that really just shattered any idea that I had about acting, you know. Look at that, smooth between one and two. Did you have any awareness of acting at this time? Only insofar as my dad watched a lot of films. So I'd go home and we'd watch a movie every night and he always loved watching classic films. The idea of being an actor didn't feel anywhere inside the realm of possibility. What was your life like down here? Is it happy memories? Yeah, I do have happy memories. I was such a shy kid at that time and I didn't play with other children a lot, but I spent a lot of time in my room playing the guitar. How did you deal with your shyness? Are you still shy? Yeah, but now I just, through going to so many acting classes from the time I was about 12, and I think that was the thing that initially, I guess, made me want to explore acting in the first place was it gave me a place to, it gave me techniques to be able to deal with certain emotions that I may have repressed, you know. Tools. Yes, he was shy. Sometimes he would come to our house. I'd take him home with me and he was very nervous and he had to call his mom and he'd say, can I call my mom? Sure, honey. And he'd bring his own supplies. He brought a milk jug once because I didn't have the right milk. He just needed, he needed home. He needed home. Five. The five, there you go. All right, here we go. My mother had remarried and I had a stepbrother who got scouted by a talent agent to do extra work and we didn't know what extra work was and so I just tagged along on a ride up to LA. You go to the right. You go right. Okay, that was just instinct. What's going to be interesting is looking at the house that I grew up in. Yeah, okay. I want to, I don't want to bother the people that live there but I want to just go see it myself. But I do remember this lumber spot. My dad and I used to go there. My dad liked to build things out of wood and this can all lumber. So that's the lumber yard. Yeah, that's, we used to go there. From extra work. Yeah. How did that then progress to acting? I ended up getting connected to Pat Cutler and so Pat became my first manager and she then set me up with my first agent and that's, and then it just was a process of going on hundreds and hundreds of auditions. I heard your mum used to drive you to auditions. Yeah, she did. So was there a lot of rejection then? I mean, just tell me about that. They'd tell me you have to go on 100 auditions before you expect to book one. Some days I'd have two auditions in a day and it just, it became a numbers game. My mom would just, she was so supportive. And I look back now at the amount of hours that she spent just driving me to auditions and then waiting outside and driving me to acting class and waiting for two hours and then picking me up and driving me back down here, I would be nowhere without that support. The 70s, you know, when you look at Pacino or then you go and you look at De Niro or you go back further to Brando or they were cutting their teeth on stage because you're only as good as you are that night. You're starting to like this car, man. I am. There's certain things in my life that I think are going to take me many years to fully comprehend because it's the same thing with Baz. I'd watched Romeo and Juliet when I was 15 and it really shifted the way that I saw how movies could be made. But as you and I have talked about so much, there's no, the imperfections are some of, I mean, that's where the juice is and that's where you capture lightning in a bottle. So what did your folks do here? So my dad was a commercial real estate appraiser and then my mom, before I was born, she was a dental hygienist and then she, when I was born, she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and so she started doing daycare out of the house. Actually, the first kid that she ever watched was my best friend growing up, Brad, who his mom was my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Betts. So I hear we're going to get to see her today, actually, which is really special. Oh, hey. How are you? Nice to see you guys. I like that you can just open the whole thing up like that. Oh, yeah, I wish the window opened. Yeah, there you go. It's nice to meet you. What's your name? Erica. Erica, I'm Austin. Nice to meet you. When I think of where I started as this kid who didn't have a way of expressing his emotions in the real world and so through playing pretend, even before I knew it was a profession, there was a way that I could let out something that was happening inside of me. Yep. How far is school? 1.2 miles. So you were homeschooled. Why were you homeschooled? I started homeschooling. I started homeschooling right after elementary school, mostly because I just wanted to be. I didn't want to go to school, but it coincided with when I started acting. OK. So then it allowed me to have the freedom to go to set. This is the school. This is it? This is it. No way. Oh, my goodness. Hey, guys. Hello. Oh, my gosh. This is crazy. His mom wasn't my babysitter, so she watched my babies when you got to go to work. Oh, my gosh. Wow. So this was kindergarten. Isn't that amazing? 31. You were 31? So you were my age. Yeah. I am. I'm here. And look at me, Ford. This is first grade. I just think about how it shaped me so much. You guys were such good teachers. You're just such good teachers. I felt that my thoughts and ideas and opinions mattered. And whenever I had trouble with something, the care that they put into helping me to learn it and grow, it sparked just this curiosity that I have today. Because it's funny, because in acting classes and different things, I've gone here in my imagination to bring up certain emotions from being a kid. Oh, my God. The kids are so small. Wow. This is Mr. Payne's room now. I speak in complete sentences. I sat about here. Show me. Sit where you sat. Yeah, I think it was... This feels right. It's this house on the corner. This one, the green one? Yeah. It used to have hedges in the front. I've never gone back to the house that I was raised in, and I've never come back here to the school. The house that I was brought home from the hospital to. And that same metal graded door on the front, we had the same thing. It was black at that time when we painted it. The house used to be a blue color. And then there used to be these hedges that went in front of that front window. How is it? It's something really comforting about it, you know? And there's a lot of feelings of nostalgia coming up. And I would climb up on that side of the roof there, and I would hide there. I was such an adventurous little kid. I've climbed on this roof so many times. My mom creating this environment at home that was so creative. And very open to whatever your heart was wanting to do that day, you know? A certain type of playing pretend, you know? I would dress up as an old man and go to the grocery store with my mom. She was so supportive. We'd go to the thrift store and just pick up a bunch of random clothes. And she had this chest of dress of clothes. So it would just spark my imagination in so many ways. But being able to see it fresh and have that childlike play, you know? Baz always talks about that, how it's a screen play. You know, when you go to a play, it's all a state of play that you're trying to get back to. The childlike innocence that you have, you know? The times before any pain really hits you, you know? Like before my parents got divorced and when the whole family's together. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Right by this fire hydrant, I opened it up. I was going in there, popped it off. And then I looked down and there's a Black Widow on my hand. And I have such a vivid memory of sitting right there and flinging this Black Widow off my... Lemonade stands out on that corner. Garage sales out here. That ride always really terrified me when I was a kid, where you just drop. I like it more now. A lot of it in the beginning was also when acting isn't going well and you're not truthful, it feels like nails on a chalkboard. It's just such a... When you're not finding truth, it's so painful. There's certain creative depths that you kind of want to go into that maybe the material isn't supportive. I did a show when I was about 23 and that's right around the time that my mom passed away. And so she passed away in the next week. I had to leave to go to New Zealand and start shooting a TV show. And it really started to shift my priorities. And when I finished that show, I said I'd rather not work than to do work and I'm not having to dig into those parts of myself that I want to explore. And I ended up just not working for about eight or nine months. That's a great story though. Yeah. You turned down everything and said I'd rather not work. Yeah. And in the midst of it, you don't know if there's a light at the end of the tunnel, you know? But that's, I guess, what having faith is, right? When you're not working as an actor, you kind of start questioning your purpose in life and to try to figure out my place in the world and deal with grief in that way for the first time. So I took a lot of time off. And then my agent called and told me that Denzel Washington was going to do Iceman Cometh on Broadway. That was really the thing that changed my whole career. For one, it was being in the rehearsal room with him and really just learning that there's no one right way to do anything artistic. Thank you. This is not a drill. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. I was raised down here. How did it feel today to have your teachers talking about how shy you were? I wondered, actually, when you asked if they thought I was shy, if they were going to say, no, he was really outgoing. You know how you tell yourself stories in your mind all the time? So I didn't know if that was actually the reality almost in that moment. And then when they said that I was, it sort of reiterated the reality that's in my mind, which is that I was very shy, but I love to play pretend. You know? Oh, my gosh. It is so good. So when I was a kid, we didn't have much money. So a fancy meal was coming and getting an In-N-Out burger or going and getting a pizza or some sort of fast food was like a fancy night out. So this takes me right back. I mean, it's the best burger in the world, right? Getting to witness great actors in the midst of them finding character. So I learned so much from him just in the rehearsal room and then being on stage. And it also proved a lot of things to myself, because I had to really go far outside my comfort zone. You know, a shy kid to suddenly be on stage with these powerhouse actors was really terrifying. It changed me and then it also changed the way that people saw me. Coming back at a good time. This is Warner Brothers here. They're like family now after everything with Elvis. You shot that? Hell yeah. I love studios. I love how it feels as though they haven't changed in so much time. You look at Humphrey Bogart there or whoever it is and you just feel the history. So this is Knott's Berry Farm. We would actually come here more than we would go to Disneyland. And this is the ride that my mom and I, when they first opened this ride, we rode it once and then had such a good time that as soon as it finished, my mom looked at me and she said, do you want to go again? And then so we waited in line again, rode it a second time and then same thing. And we ended up riding it seven times in a row. Thank you. I got to thank you, man. Truly, thank you. This was a really special day. I was really soul-stirring, you know. It was a beautiful thing to witness, man. It was lovely to see the selflessness of a teacher. Yeah, yeah. 25 years to see whether the work you've done has flowered in a certain way. All right, man. Yeah, thank you.