Austin Butler revealed he hired a dialect coach to get rid of his Elvis Presley accent before shooting his new Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air.
The Elvis actor Austin Butler revealed that he needed some professional help to get rid of the music legend’s accent before shooting his new TV show, Masters of the Air, premiering on Apple TV+ Jan. 26.
“I had a dialect coach just to help me not sound like Elvis,” Austin Butler admitted in a Jan. 24 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “It was a whole thing.”
In fact, the Golden Globe winner had to put in more work than simply dropping the accent, considering he practiced method acting for three years to prepare for his titular role in the 2022 Baz Luhrmann-directed biopic.
“I was just trying to remember who I was,” Butler continued. “I was trying to remember what I liked to do. All I thought about was Elvis for three years.”
Butler credited his Elvis costar Tom Hanks with convincing him to dive head-first into playing Major Gale Cleven in Masters of the Air, a World War II drama series that also stars Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan.
“I was having dinner with Tom Hanks in Australia,” the 32-year-old recalled. “He was sort of joking, saying, ‘You’re gonna lose your mind when you finish this three years of your life focused on this one thing. You’re gonna have to find something else to jump right into afterward.”
Hanks, who’s a producer on Masters of the Air, already had the Apple TV+ show in the works.
“I started a week after,” the Dune: Part Two actor said. “I had a week off after Elvis. It was almost too fast.”
Butler’s struggle to shake off his Elvis character has drawn a lot of attention from fans, but the Carrie Diaries star doesn’t let the scrutiny get to him.
“If I was trying to sound like Elvis, I would sound very different right now,” he told the Los Angeles Times in January 2022. “I think it’s sort of amusing to me how much people want to focus on this one thing.”