It’s July 1969 and Elvis Presley has less than a week to go before the beginning of his sold-out residency at The International Hotel. He’s deep in rehearsals, practising up to five hours a day in the 2,000-seat Las Vegas venue for his first live performance in eight years. No longer the 19-year-old rebel whose prodigious on-stage charisma and command of rhythm and blues helped shepherd in sheltered white America’s sexual awakening, the question on everybody’s lips was does he still have it?

“I want to try something new,” The King swaggers in his Memphis drawl as his 30-piece orchestra, five-man combo and chorus of seven await his instructions. He starts with his pianist, “Alright Glen, you’re going to start us off, OK? Take the intro here: bom-bom-bom-bom-ba…” He percusses as his keys player springs into a gospel-like rendition of ‘That’s All Right’, the Arthur Crudup song that set Elvis on his route to superstardom. He moves on to the guitar, then bass, then drums, each being coached by the main man as the sound starts to rise to a crescendo, and then– “CUT!”

Snap back to the present day, 2021, and Elvis director Baz Luhrmann isn’t feeling it; something’s not quite right. Austin Butler, starring as the titular character, knew it, too. For eight months, the young actor had been practising this number with a backing track filling in for the live band, but it left the scene without the dynamism nor the spontaneity that the performance demanded.

As Butler recalls, “We did one take, and it just felt so dead. Baz came up to me looking really worried. He told me, ‘All these are real musicians, but their instruments are muted. What if we unmute them and play live instead of to the track?’ He told the musicians, ‘I want you to intentionally play it wrong.’ So, we did another take, and it just became this cacophony. It was the one time I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack, like I wasn't capable of it, you know? And then the costume people come up and they're touching your clothes, and the makeup people are coming up and touching your face, and suddenly I'm surrounded by people and I feel that I'm just going to fail.”

Austin Butler Square Mile magazine cover
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Photographer: Mathew Brookes | Stylist: Sandra Amador | Groomer: Jillian Halouska

Even the greats are capable of a little imposter syndrome every once in a while, but for Butler this role – a full three years in the making – was an opportunity to explode from relative obscurity onto the world’s stage. Having graduated from teen sitcoms like Hannah Montana and iCarly, his career was gathering momentum after recent roles in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, as well as debuting on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington in “The Iceman Cometh”, but taking on a leading Hollywood role as Elvis Presley no less? There’s simply nowhere to hide, no amount of AI or post-production that can help you imitate the inimitable, your only choice is to nail the performance or the audience will crucify you.

The 200th Issue

Austin Butler edition

This May, we’re launching the 200th issue of Square Mile. That’s 20 years’ work; six different offices; 30,000 pages; and more words than we can count. 

To mark the occasion, we’re making Issue 200 our biggest and best yet, including a series of limited-edition front covers. First up, none other than your man, Austin Butler.

To pre-order a copy, go here.

Butler needed to breathe. “I said, you know, can I just take 10 minutes alone? And I went into a back room and I gave myself a pep talk. I looked in the mirror and I said, you do not have to do this perfectly, but you have the music in your mind. You spend 10 minutes with that piano player if you have to, to get it right. And then I went back out there and I spent as long as I needed with the piano player. And I got him doing it exactly how I heard it in my mind. And then I moved on, and I moved on. And suddenly it became beautiful. And we could hear the harmony of the music. And it was real at that point. And by the end of that, it was electric in the room. And that became one of my favourite moments of the entire filming process. But it came out of a moment that was terrifying, where I felt that I was just going to fail. So it became beautiful.”

Luhrman’s dazzling filmmaking style with its emphasis on visual maximalism lends itself to the glitzy Las Vegas lights, but it’s Butler’s extraordinary performance that gave them colour. The actor spent two years poring over old Elvis interviews until he could recite them word for word, he worked tirelessly with a dialect coach to master the singer’s tone, and he even visited the late Priscilla Presley to seek her counsel. Indeed, Ms Presley gave perhaps the best review Butler could ask for when she said, “It was more than I ever expected. He became Elvis.”

Austin Butler

Austin Butler joins the Breitling Squad as brand ambassador and the face of the new Top Time B31.

Such was the mental and physical toll the experience exerted upon him that Butler was hospitalised a day after he finished filming with a virus that simulates appendicitis and was confined to a week’s bedrest. “I knew that the only way that I could do it was if I gave it everything that I had,” he told the Los Angeles Times, and he most certainly did. The looks, the mannerisms, the voice, Butler had delved into his soul and produced one of the great biopic performances of recent times – and there’s been plenty of merit. That he lost the Best Actor gong at the 2023 Oscars to Brendan Fraser’s performance in The Whale seems a cruel twist of fate, but he came out of awards season a Golden Globe and BAFTA winner, his star shining with infinite possibilities for what the future may hold. The question was, what’s next?

For Butler, the answer to that is perhaps a little different to the average actor. Some are driven by the art, others by more materialistic motivations, but for the California native his north star is the feeling of fear and unease that a new challenge offers to him.

“I'd say I'm just constantly looking for things that I haven't done before. I've spoken a lot about fear – the feeling of using fear as a compass. So, if I have two projects and one scares me more, I'll tend to lean toward that one because you're going out on a limb a little bit further, and it's going to pull something out of you that maybe you hide away. Something like Dune: Part Two was very different for me, and it turned out to be such a joy to play in that way,” he tells me.

Austin Butler

The utterly terrifying Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a psychotic warrior whose cunning is only matched by his bloodlust, is about as far as one could travel from the handsome, gyrating charisma of Elvis Presley, however Butler nonetheless shaped the character into a memorable villain with yet another tremendous physical performance. The death match in the Harkonnen Arena features a spine-chilling frame where Feyd-Rautha, so consumed with animalistic rage, starts to drool uncontrollably when confronted by his own mortality. It’s a brilliant moment that shows just how deep Butler is able to reside within a character in the process of bringing them to life.

“In regard to Dune, the director, Denis Villeneuve – I mean, I'd do anything to work with him. The character itself is something very different. Sometimes, there are roles [like Elvis] where I'll take them on for an emotional reason. It’s at a certain point in my life where I'm exploring something and sort of processing something in my own soul. And then that will be a way in which I can, almost like a diary entry, bring that into the work. Dune wasn't that for me. That wasn't my own – I didn't need to go through my psychopathic era!”

And, yet, we’re so glad that you dared to go there, Austin.

**********

There was an article published in TheGuardian back in 2022 which asked, “Has the 21st century killed off the movie star?” It ponders whether there is room in the modern age for a real capital-A actor in a world dominated by streaming services, endless superhero waffle, and a – shall we say – ‘watered down’ approach to Hollywood glamour. And they may be right. Perhaps the appetite simply isn’t there any more and the movie star will go extinct when Tom Cruise hangs up his flight suit. But if ever there were an heir to the throne, a star capable of “opening” blockbuster movies for the next couple of decades, I would confidently suggest that Austin Butler is your man.

Butler is an old soul. Whether it’s his looks or his sensibilities, everything about him screams that he’s straight out of a different era. At one point in our conversation, he talks about a recent road trip to the Grand Canyon – hiking along its rocky tendrils and setting up camp overnight – and you can’t help but think how well he would have gotten along with the actors of the golden age of Hollywood.

It’s an irony that’s not lost on Butler for whom much of his personal style is informed by iconic pictures and films featuring his heroes: “When you look at images of Paul Newman – there’s a great one, I think from the Venice Film Festival – his tuxedo, the way it fits, the fabric, it will always be timeless. We were just talking earlier about that first scene with Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, the way his T-shirt fits in that film, it will never not be cool. […] There’s also a great image of James Dean taking a photograph, and he’s got this watch on.”

Austin Butler

And what of McQueen? “I’m a big fan of Steve McQueen. What was so cool about him was not just his style but the way he lived his life. I heard a story from Barbara McQueen – she said that if you were going out to lunch with him, you always packed an overnight bag, because he would just say, let’s drive – and suddenly, that lunch turned into a two-day road trip.”

His headlong approach to every project is also straight from the vintage action star’s blueprint. You need only look at him riding a horse in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, eating up the tarmac on a motorcycle for Bike Riders, or the fact that he studied Filipino stick fighting, both the Kali and Eskrima disciplines, for Dune: Part Two to see the hallmarks of the old school.

Much like his sense of style, Butler has a shared passion for watches as an extension of his personality and aesthetic. It was only a matter of time before one of the biggest names in the business snapped him up and, in March this year, he was announced as Breitling’s newest brand ambassador, following in the footsteps of Brad Pitt, Adam Driver and Charlize Theron.

“I’ve been a big fan of Breitling for a long time,” he says of the collaboration. “It feels like such an organic partnership because it fits my style in a way that I love. I use the term ‘modern retro’, and that fits into what I look for. I think about Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and how Marlon Brando used to dress. There’s a timelessness to those images that still resonates today.”

Austin Butler

Butler stars in Breitling’s new campaign revolving around the Top Time B31. As a product of the 1960s, it’s a match made in heaven for the actor – perfectly at home under the cuff of a suit or tucked safely away beneath a heavy duty leather jacket.

At the watch’s original launch in 1964, Willy Breitling exclaimed the novelty to be an “ultramodern watch… particularly suited to the needs of young and active professionals”, so one can only imagine the grandson of the brand’s founder, Léon Breitling, would have approved of selecting Butler as its wrist model. While the actor won’t get to enjoy the geiger counter secretly hidden in 007’s iteration in Thunderball, this new model does feature the newly Breitling-designed Caliber B31 three-hand movement – the latest step forward on the brand’s journey to becoming 100% manufacture.

Butler has already nerded out on the particulars of watchmaking at Breitling’s HQ, and is similarly enthused about his new wrist candy: “We talked about the four year process of designing this movement – the craftsmanship, the precision of each element and how everything fits together, I can't even comprehend how it's actually possible to figure this out. It's amazing. And the fact that it's analog, it's just an incredible work of art.”

Austin Butler

Speaking of art, it would be remiss of me to speak to Elvis incarnate without at least mentioning music. He’s been “listening to a lot of Chet Baker lately” as well as Todd Field, and his beloved Radiohead, whom he frequently cites as his favourite band.

But I’m curious to discover how important music is to his acting method – does it provide him with the kinetic energy to throw himself into a particular? Absolutely, he says: “I find it incredibly helpful because music, in the same way as our sense of smell, has a way of getting underneath your conscious mind. You know, those times when you listen to a song and it just gives you chills or makes you emotional out of nowhere or invigorates you in some way? That's an incredibly helpful thing to be able to use. I have a playlist of songs that can link me to certain feelings. So, I usually will make a playlist for each character.”

One can only imagine the playlist he might compile for Patrick Bateman, for whom he is set to depict in Luca Guadagnino's new adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho. Few would dare follow in the footsteps of Christian Bale’s giant performance as Bateman, but you get the feeling that fear has once again guided Butler in a fascinating direction for us in the audience.

Austin Butler

Where else does the compass point? “There’s a movie that I just did with Darren Aronofsky [Caught Stealing, slated for release in August 2025]. I'm proud of him – I mean, he pushed me in ways that I haven't been pushed before.” There’s also an Ari Aster-directed dark comedy on the horizon called Eddington, with a stellar cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal.

Before we say our goodbyes, we dig a little deeper into what makes Butler tick, to ask if there’s any role that perhaps he hasn’t played yet that he hopes may be in his future.

“There's so many different types of films that have affected me in my life that have given me that experience of either some sort of emotional catharsis or that moment when you watch a film and you're just completely transported. I just want to be a part of that. And yeah, I don't think there's a specific genre,” he says.

“But I have a number of different directors that I am very much looking forward to working with. Yeah, I would say I'm mostly director-driven right now.”

Austin Butler

There’s a scene right at the beginning of Elvis where Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker marvels at Presley’s performance, but he could just as easily have been talking about Austin Butler himself: “In that moment in a flash of lightning, I watched that skinny boy in the pink suit transform himself into a superhero.”

The future is sparklingly bright for Butler – governed by strong instincts and an old-school drive to throw himself into every cinematic role he plays. Who knows? He might just be the hero Hollywood needs.

See this interview in its full glossy glory in Square Mile's 200th issue – preorder here now. Breitling Austin Butler Top Time B31, 38mm, leather strap, £4,550; Breitling Austin Butler Top Time B31, 38mm, stainless-steel bracelet, £4,850. For more information on the Breitling Top Time B31, see breitling.com