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Austin Butler spent two years working on Elvis, which consisted of sleepless nights, and fear he wouldn’t do the singer justice. As he got struggled to get into character, everything changed when he found out he lost his mom at the same age as the singer. “When I learned about his mom,” he told Today with Hoda & Jenna, “that just hit me.”
Butler has been praised for his performance as Elvis Presley, with the film gaining a 12-minute standing ovation at Cannes. But playing someone like Presley was what Butler called one of the hardest things he’s ever done, especially knowing people like Lisa Marie and his ex-wife Priscilla Presley would be watching it. “That was the thing that would really wake me up every day. I was waking up around in the morning even if I went to bed at 1. I couldn’t sleep, I wake up, and my heart is pounding,” he said.
While Butler practiced dancing and singing like Elvis, there was something they always had in common, losing their mother at the age of 23. When the hosts asked how that inspired him to get into the role, Butler explained that at first, he wasn’t finding his work authentic. “When you first look at Elvis, he feels so much larger than life, and you look at him like a god-like figure or a caricature of Elvis, and I fell into that the first month when I was trying to work on it, where I taped myself, and I watched it back, and I saw an impersonation,” he said.
“It was when I learned about his mom, and then knowing that we were the exact same age- that just hit me,” he explained. Butler lost his mom Lori in 2014 after her battle with cancer, and Elvis lost his mother, Gladys Presley, in 1958 from a heart attack. “It was just one of those things where you know the stars are aligning, and that just became the most personal thing,” the 30-year-old added.
As for what’s next for Butler? After dedicating two years of his life to Elvis, he said he needed to remember who he was,“I got into pottery in London,” he said with a laugh.
Elvis hits theaters on June 24th.