Austin Butler

At the Louisiana Hayride in Elvis (2022), a boy in a pink suit stands at a microphone and his legs start to shake. Baz Luhrmann cuts to the girls in the crowd, but the thing worth watching is Butler: the lip, the planted feet, the sideways look at the band as if checking they have noticed too. Two years later, in Dune: Part Two (2024), he is bald, whispering, lit like a corpse, and speaking in Stellan Skarsgård's voice. These are the two best things he has done on a screen, and both of them are copied from someone else.

He came up through children's television, with parts in Zoey 101, iCarly and Hannah Montana, moved on to teen drama, and made his Broadway debut in the 2018 revival of The Iceman Cometh. Quentin Tarantino gave him a small part in a big film as Tex in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), and Luhrmann gave him the lead three years after that. Since then he has worked for Denis Villeneuve, Jeff Nichols and Darren Aronofsky, a run of directors most actors his age would envy.

The method is well known: years of preparation for Presley with voice, movement and dialect coaches, and an accent that stayed with him after the cameras stopped. He has said his aim was "not becoming a caricature of him", and on screen he kept to it. He is remarkable across the whole span of Elvis, and the late stretch is where he got to us. There is a sequence built around a television special in 1968, and we were more moved than we had any right to be by a man in a leather suit singing a ballad. The reason is plain: for once the film stopped moving, and Butler was allowed to stand still and sing to the end of the song.

Take the borrowed voice away and the picture is thinner. In The Bikeriders (2024), Benny is the man everyone wants, and Butler plays him as stillness, a lowered chin and a cigarette. Jodie Comer talks about him for two hours and we came away knowing her far better than the man she was describing. Caught Stealing (2025) is more encouraging. Hank Thompson is a passive part, the plot happens to him, and Butler carries it by being funny in the gaps: the pause before he opens a door, the way he keeps apologising to people who are hitting him. Nobody taught him that. It is timing, and it is his.

So the question is whether a director will hand him nothing to copy and a great deal to say, and whether he wants that. The apologising punchbag suggests he might manage it. Until then, give him somebody else's voice, turn the sound up, and stand back.