Ever since Austin Butler’s incredible Oscar-nominated portrayal of Elvis Presley, there’s one question that seems to follow him everywhere: Will he ever drop the accent? Since the movie was released in June 2022, fans, comedians, late-night hosts, and even Butler himself have joked about his inability to give up his Elvis accent.
Across interviews, movie roles, and even his Saturday Night Live monologue, listeners can’t help but notice his deeper voice and southern drawl. So, what exactly makes it so hard for Butler’s voice to change, and will it ever go back to the way it was?
Butler has revealed just how much time and dedication he poured into this role. The actual audition process with director Baz Luhrmann lasted around five months and involved hiring singing, dialect, and even movement coaches to prepare. Once Butler finally got the part, he threw his entire being into playing the role of Elvis Presley.
Butler didn’t see his family for three years while working on the movie, and he had months where he didn’t talk to anybody at all. If he did, it was only about Elvis Presley, in an Elvis Presley voice, of course. He spent so much time trying to perfect Presley’s voice and dialect that he created his own sound catalog of every word the singer said.
“I’d hear him say a certain word, and I would clip just that bit out, so I knew how he said that word. I created my own archive of how he said every word and every diphthong, and the way he used musicality in his voice,” Butler told Entertainment Weekly. He also worked extensively with dialect coaches to ensure he could match Presley’s rhythm and cadence in his speech.
Butler would practice talking exactly like Presley by watching an interview or a speech and practicing over and over again until you couldn’t hear a difference between the two voices. Then, his dialect coach would weigh in on anything that sounded a little off, and Butler would just dive in deeper. He would also listen to tapes of Presley’s voice repeatedly, when he took walks or even as he fell asleep, further proving his unwavering dedication.
Presley’s voice changed quite a lot throughout his life, and the movie spans several decades, so Butler was sure to take this voice shift into account. The filming of the movie would jump across decades, with one week filming scenes in 1962 and the next in 1975, but Butler was able to break it up into time periods to make it easier and ask himself, “What am I filming today? How does he sound here?”
With this much time, effort, and devotion, it’s clear why Butler continued to speak like Presley, even after the filming ended. He had spent so much time speaking in his Elvis dialect that it was no longer simply a switch he could turn on and off. That voice had become a part of him, his mouth, his throat, his tongue, and his vocal cords. They were all trained for years to be a certain way and to sound a specific way, so it would be hard to quickly go back to their original state.
Only a week after finishing Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Butler began filming Masters of the Air, a World War II miniseries. He explained that it was almost too fast; after the intense filming process for Elvis, he was just trying to remember who he was and what he liked to do. Part of this process was hiring yet another dialect coach, but this time, he didn’t want to sound like Elvis Presley, just like himself again.
Fast forward to now, three years after the Elvis movie was released, and Butler’s southern drawl seems to have disappeared. With his new movie, Caught Stealing, directed by Darren Aronofsky and released on Aug. 29, there appears to be no evidence of Butler’s lingering Elvis accent that he was once unable to shake.
The film follows Butler’s character Hank Thompson, a baseball-loving bartender in New York City, along with Zoe Kravitz and Bad Bunny. When Hank’s neighbor asks him to take care of his cat while he’s gone, he gets caught in the middle of a threatening group of people who all want something from him. Butler’s voice was deep in the film, but it seemed natural; it seemed like him.
What once seemed like an inescapable part of Butler’s identity has now faded, with his natural voice coming back to center stage. Intense method acting can leave a lasting mark, but it doesn’t have to define an actor forever. If anything, Butler’s dedication is proof of how he throws himself right into anything he does, which deserves nothing but respect.
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