Summary
- Austin Butler says that Tom Hanks advised him to avoid strong emotional impact after playing Elvis.
- Hanks advised Butler to take on the new project immediately so as not to get too caught up in the previous role.
- Butler seems to have taken Hanks’ advice, as his next roles are very different from his Elvis persona.
Austin Butler, Elvis’ protagonist, talks about the advice Tom Hanks gave him about the future of his career. Butler played singer and crooner Elvis Presley in the 2022 film, a role he dived deep into and eventually earned him a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. In the film, Tom Hanks plays Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, whose tight control over Elvis’ life has become a source of conflict despite their mutual success.
Speaking to The Times ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Austin Butler spoke about his experience with Elvis. He reveals that Tom Hanks gave him advice on how to avoid a “high emotional impact” after he put in so much effort to play Elvis. Hanks advised him to make sure he “immediately puts on something else” and even offered him a role in his upcoming project Masters of the Air, the sequel to Band of Brothers. Here is Butler’s full quote:
He said, “You’ve become so immersed in Elvis that it would make sense for your sanity to do something else right away. If you pull away abruptly, you can get emotionally hurt.”
The future roles of Austin Butler are very different from the roles of Elvis
So far, Butler seems to be taking Tom Hanks’ advice. The four future characters that the actor will play cover a wide range of tones and personalities that seem very far from the role of Elvis Presley. Among them is Masters of the Air, in which he plays Major Gale Kleven, a character who served in the US Air Force’s 100th Bomber Squadron during World War II.
Butler’s other future roles are mostly complex characters or even villains. In addition to playing a member of a Midwestern motorcycle club in the 1960s in The Cyclists, Butler will play a real-life crime boss in the film adaptation of Don Winslow’s book City on Fire. However, both of these characters are likely to be weak compared to his role in the cast of Dune: Part Two.
Elvis’ star will appear in the sci-fi sequel as Fade-Rautha Harkonnen. The character, the successor to House Harkonnen, is a cruel and heartless figure, as well as the antagonist of Timothée Chalamet’s character Paul Atreides. Through these varied roles, Butler seems to have gotten rid of Elvis entirely.
Source: Times