Austin Butler had a hard time as he prepared to portray Elvis on the big screen, revealing that at one point he went home in tears after he was made fun on the stage by film executives, as director Baz Luhrmann tried to channel some of the music legend’s toughest moments.
Luhrmann wanted to get Butler “as close to” Elvis as possible, in terms of his performance. So he got all the executives “into the recording studio” at RCA in Nashville and gave them a series of directions.
“I want you all to sit facing Austin,” the actor detailed, “and he told them to heckle me. So then they were making fun of me and stuff while I was singing.”
“When we were filming this moment, when Elvis first goes on stage and he’s getting heckled by the audience, I knew what that felt like,” Austin admitted. “I went home in tears that night. I really did.”
It seems the preparation to play the fan-favorite artist was full of different emotions, as Austin was told this was supposed to be a “laid-back, playful” recording session and was surprised with how it all went down.
“I was so nervous, and we were recording on actual equipment that Elvis recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on,” he said during a recent interview. “We got down there and it was not that at all. We were recording old-school, where all the musicians — and these are the best musicians in the world; our guitar player had actually played guitar with Scotty Moore, who was Elvis’ guitar player — we were recording the entire song.”
“I realize now he likes to be very spontaneous on set, so he wanted to see if I would lose my mind,” Austin recalled about his experience with the director on the set of the biopic.