Elvis, Dune, The Bikeriders: How Austin Butler’s career shifted into high gear
In the wake of his BAFTA and Golden Globe Award winning performance as Elvis, Austin Butler has become one of Tinsel Town’s most sought-after actors. His latest film tracks the rise and fall of an outlaw motorcycle gang in 1960s and 70s Chicago.
Austin Butler strides into a room at Sydney’s Intercontinental Hotel on a dull winter’s day, looking like the epitome of sun-kissed California cool. The Oscar nominee has reclaimed his blond locks after dying them black for his barnstorming turn as Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, while he appeared as bald as an egg, with blackened teeth, in Denis Villeneuve’s recent sci-fic blockbuster, Dune: Part Two.
Today, Butler wears a short-sleeved grey T-shirt over a long-sleeved white one, and as he rests his long, tanned forearms on a small table, he leans in closer than most interview subjects typically do, signalling that he is giving Review his full attention. With his chilled demeanour and open, expectant look, the actor initially seems more like a friendly surfer dude dropping by for a smoothie than a Hollywood A-lister on an international promotional tour for his latest film, The Bikeriders.
All of which is momentarily discombobulating.
The 32-year-old warmly declares that “Australia feels like my second home”. In the wake of his BAFTA and Golden Globe Award winning performance as Elvis – which was mostly filmed on the Gold Coast – he has become one of Tinsel Town’s most sought-after actors, and a bona fide celebrity to boot.
Butler has four million followers on Instagram, even though he appears to have made only four posts on the platform, and there is a plethora of breathless web tutorials about how to copy his gelled quiff or artfully messy hairstyles. He dates model Kaia Gerber, daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, and markets a perfume with an obligatory weird spelling (he is a global ambassador for YSL Beauty and its masculine fragrance, Myslf.)
The actor was in Australia earlier this month to talk about his role as a brooding, at times masochistic biker, Benny, in Jeff Nichols’s new film, The Bikeriders. With a gritty period look and feel, The Bikeriders tracks the rise and fall of an outlaw motorcycle gang, the Vandals, in 1960s and 70s Chicago. What starts out as a recreational group for men who feel they don’t fit anywhere else, eventually turns into a murderous criminal gang.
This in turn, reflects America’s loss of innocence in the wake of the disaster that was the Vietnam War. As Butler puts it, “as the trauma of the late 60s starts to really come back from Vietnam and as some of the members start transitioning from being drinkers or pot smokers to heavier drugs like heroin … violence becomes more of a core element. That’s when it (the gang) starts to eat itself from the inside.’’
Nonetheless, while drinking at bars alone, his character, Benny, could smoulder for America. He is a sensual man of few words – but also a hard case who would rather be beaten to a pulp than remove his gang “colours” in a pub outside the Vandals’ territory. Says Butler: “I think it sort of speaks to how he’s unwavering. He’s not gonna change for anybody else. He’s not afraid of confrontation. He’s not afraid of pain.
“There’s that kind of mindset; you see it in fighter pilots (Butler plays a pilot in Apple TV+’s current series Masters of the Air), or different people who live life on the edge, daredevil sort of people, where it’s like you need to live life on the edge, in order to feel. I think he definitely has that.’’
Asked how close to the edge he has gone for his roles, he replies candidly: “Sometimes it feels more vibrant when you push something right to the edge. You know, where you are on the edge of failure, or you’re on the edge of embarrassment or pain or the edge of your own capabilities.’’
Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 photographic and oral history of a real midwestern motorcycle gang, also titled The Bikeriders, Nichols’s film also explores a battle of wills fought over the elusive Benny between Benny’s wife, Kathy, played by Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, and gang boss Johnny (Tom Hardy). As the gang becomes more lawless, Kathy wants Benny to leave it, while Johnny wants him to step up and become the Vandals’ next leader.
Butler says that Benny “is an interesting one – Jeff (Nichols) describes him as an empty glass that everybody wants to fill, but he can’t be filled. And everybody wants to fill him with their own expectations. He’s an incredibly loyal person – as long as rules aren’t imposed upon him.’’
Initially, he says, Benny is drawn to the Vandals because “it’s full of outlaws and full of these outsiders who don’t want rules. And the funny thing is, they start imposing rules upon themselves.’’
Benny and Kathy get married just five weeks after they meet in a bar and Butler says “he’s always got one foot out the door’’. He tells Review: “Where it starts is this connection, this magnetism and staring into each other’s eyes. And then at a certain point, she starts imposing rules on him, of ‘Let’s move to Florida; I want you to quit the club.’ And suddenly, that doesn’t work well with Benny.’’
Comer’s Kathy narrates the film with an extravagant midwestern twang, as she looks back with a sense of undimmed amazement at how quickly she married Benny and became a Vandal, clinging like a rock oyster to his back on a vintage bike. Butler says Comer “puts in so much hard work, I’m in awe of her. Also, I have to comment on how she did this play called Prima Facie.’’
He is referring to Comer’s electrifying solo performance on the West End and Broadway in Australian Suzie Miller’s play, Prima Facie, about a hard-driving defence lawyer who finds herself in the witness stand after she makes a sexual assault allegation. The British actor won a 2023 Tony Award for her Broadway outing and Butler says: “It’s masterful what she does, (including) the amount of hard work that she put into this film and perfecting her voice.’’ Butler says Comer “sounds identical to the real Kathy, when you listen to the recordings of Kathy – there were these idiosyncrasies in her voice … It wasn’t just a general Chicago accent, it was a very particular idiolect that she had. And Jodie nailed it.’’
Butler has joked that for his Elvis role, which spanned several decades of the superstar’s life, “I didn’t sleep for two years’’. To prepare for his channelling of the king of rock ‘n’ roll, he drew on method acting techniques and spent months talking exclusively in Elvis’s voice. He also had to learn to dance – furiously gyrating his legs and hips – and to sing Elvis’s early songs.
Elvis, of course, was the role that vaulted the actor into the stratosphere, earning him a best actor nomination at the 2023 Academy Awards and other career-boosting accolades. The performer who started acting professionally as a teenager, playing walk-on and supporting roles for Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, says Luhrmann’s film “absolutely” changed his life.
The extraordinary demands of that role – and the Covid pandemic that shut down the Elvis set for six months – have done little to blunt his enthusiasm for Australia. He spent almost two years here, living and working on the Gold Coast during the pandemic. “I spent such a pivotal time in my life here and a long period of time,’’ he says. “It was also a very unique moment in history and in the world during the pandemic and being here – it bonded me with so many of my Australian friends and just with the country in general.’’ He wraps up this interview with an apparently sincere yet Paltrow-esque shout out to Australia: “I feel very filled with love while I’m here.’’
In Dune: Part Two, Butler was virtually unrecognisable as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a pitiless, gravel-voiced assassin with “high intelligence” and a deep attraction to knives. He spent three hours in makeup to achieve that transformation – his baldness caps almost reached down to his eyelids – and he admits he was initially taken aback by the look required by Villeneuve.
“I wasn’t anticipating that aesthetic,’’ he reveals, smiling. “I didn’t know how it would feel, embodying that look. But once we did the makeup tests, and when I started to experiment with different vocal things and physicality, it actually spawned a lot of creative ideas.’’ Critics wrote that he was “memorable” and “phenomenal” in the role.
The actor can currently be seen on the small screen in the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks-produced Apple TV + series, Masters of the Air. This big-budget series is about pilots who fought the Nazis in World War II. Butler’s character, Major Gale “Buck” Cleven, is based on a real pilot who was part of the 100th Bomb Group, a division that suffered so many deaths, it was nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth.”
He says of this: “It was the most volatile place that a human being could be – up in the air during that time. And yeah, the statistics were mind boggling, how many died. It was just absolutely harrowing what they went into.’’ To make the aerial duels look convincing, he and the other actors “did a lot of (training in) fight flight simulators. And we had a pilot, who I spent hours and hours with in a cockpit, learning every button, every switch.’’
In 2018, he made his Broadway debut in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, opposite acting legend Denzel Washington – and learned other valuable lessons about the cult of perfection. He says: “Firstly … I was with these powerhouse actors, getting to be in a rehearsal room. That’s an experience you don’t really have on set on a film set, because you don’t rehearse very much, for the most part.’’
Revisiting a scene in rehearsals and during the run “teaches you a lot, because you’re only as good as you are that night, so you have to keep going back to the drawing board. One of the great lessons that I learned personally, and from watching somebody like Denzel, was that there are nearly an infinite number of ways that you can approach a scene. And so there’s not this perfect way out there.’’
He admits the “idea of perfection gets in the head of a lot of artists, and I still feel it at times; that there’s like a perfect way that you’ve got to find. That was such an impressive, inspirational lesson – there are nuances that are shifting at any given moment.’’
Although Butler was a Broadway first-timer, he made quite an impact on The New Yorker’s critic Hilton Als, who opened his review by declaring that while there were many performers in this revival, “there is only one actor, and his name is Austin Butler’’. Als went on to praise how Butler – playing a boy living at a Manhattan dive bar – used “economy of movement and facial expression’’ to capture his character’s inner life.
The A-lister is no stranger to the world of motorbikes: His father and grandfather rode them, and he learned when he was 16. He was raised in California, and as a young child, he would ride on the back of his father’s bike to visit his grandparents in Arizona.
He uses vintage motorcycles in The Bikeriders, and says they are “definitely harder to ride’’ than modern bikes. “They each have their own personality,’’ he says. By coincidence, he rode Harleys during his long stint in Australia: “When I was in Australia shooting Elvis, I met a man who fixed up old Harleys and we would go riding together. That was my first time getting on an older bike. It helped get me ready for the film.” How did he handle driving on the left? He chuckles lightly, adding: “I’d been here for so long at that point and I’d been driving. And so I was used to it. It was weird going back to America, being on the right hand side of the road. I wasn’t used to that. It took a while to adjust.’’
At one point in The Bikeriders, Benny is alone on the open road and howling into the wind. Butler can relate to that sense of exhilaration. “I definitely feel it,’’ he says. “I felt it the other day, we were doing the press junket in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, (vehicle stunt co-ordinator) Jeff Milburn – most of the bikes you see in the film are his personal bikes – he and I just got on bikes and rode away. And it was the best feeling. Because you just feel free, you know?’’
The Bikeriders opens in cinemas on July 4
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