It was early 2019 in Los Angeles, and Austin Butler already had Elvis on the brain. A friend, hearing him sing along to "Blue Christmas" in the car, had urged him to portray the icon one day; others brought it up too. Elvis seemed to be everywhere, but it was a dream role that felt impossible.
Then the universe called. Or rather, his agent did, to say that filmmaker Baz Luhrmann was making a movie about Presley's life.
Coming off several milestones the previous year — filming Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Don't Die" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," making his Broadway debut opposite Denzel Washington in "The Iceman Cometh" — the rising actor put all auditions and meetings on hold for the next five months to concentrate on landing the role of a lifetime.
