“I’m on Jimmy Fallon talking about playing Elvis Presley … it just blows my mind,” Elvis star Austin Butler said on Wednesday’s episode of The Tonight Show
Austin Butler is still all shook up over his starring role.
On Wednesday, the 30-year-old Elvis actor took a moment on The Tonight Show to tell the host, “I’m on Jimmy Fallon talking about playing Elvis Presley … it just blows my mind.”
During his appearance, Butler also took the audience through a few different impressions of the late singer — whose voice, mannerisms and more he studied extensively ahead of his portrayal in the upcoming Baz Luhrmann drama — from the years 1954 through 1972.
“He’s nervous — his voice, at that time, you speak a lot faster when you’re nervous,” Butler said of the “young” version of Presley at age 19, going on to speak in the singer’s 21-year-old voice as well.
Of Presley in 1972, the actor explained before speaking like the late singer, “At this point, his voice goes more forward than to his face.”
Butler recently told Entertainment Tonight he has realized his voice sometimes still slips into his impersonation of Presley for the film’s titular role, even though GQ reported that filming ended in March 2021.
“It’s one of those things where certain things trigger it,” Butler told ET in an interview published Tuesday. “When you live with something for two years and you do nothing else, I think that you can’t help it. It becomes a fiber of your being.”
The actor also told ET that he tried to emphasize a portrayal of Presley as a human figure and not necessarily the King of Rock & Roll in his performance, explaining that the responsibility of playing such an iconic cultural figure put a “weight like I never felt before” on him.
“And there’s a responsibility to his family and also putting his story into context,” Butler said. “That’s the thing. There were so many misconceptions about him; there’s so many ideas of him. So I felt a responsibly to bring the humanity.”
In a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival last month, Butler spoke about what it took to become Presley: “I basically put the rest of my life on pause for two years and I just absorbed everything that I possibly could.”
He also talked about being obsessed with his character and learning more about the iconic “Love Me Tender” singer.
“I just went down the rabbit hole of obsession. And I broke down his life into periods of time where I could hear the differences in how his voice changed over the years and how his movement changed over the years and I spent two years studying, trying to find his humanity as best as I could through that,” he said at the time.
The actor continued, “The tricky thing is you see Elvis as this icon, or as the wallpaper of society and finding a way to strip all of that away and find the very human nature of him that was deeper than all of that, that’s what was fascinating for me.”
Overall, though intense, Butler said the opportunity was well worthwhile.
“The ability to get to explore that was just the joy of my life,” he said.
Elvis hits theaters June 24 and premieres on HBO Max 45 days later.
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