Austin Butler cried after being harassed by Baz Luhrmann

Don’t cry daddy.

Austin Butler has revealed that “Elvis” director Baz Luhrmann and other film executives made him cry during their first trip to RCA Studio B in Nashville, Tennessee.

To get “as close as possible to the gig,” the 30-year-old actor told VMAN Magazine that Luhrmann had brought all the executives “into the recording studio and he said, ‘I want you all to sit across from Austin’…and he told them to harass me, so then they joked about me and stuff while I was singing.”

Butler justified the director’s decision, saying there was a method for the madness when it came time to film the blockbuster.

“When we were filming this moment, when Elvis first takes the stage and he’s mobbed by the audience, I knew what that felt like,” he said, before adding: “I went home that night in tears. .I actually did it.”

Austin Butler.
Austin Butler put his “life on hiatus for two years” while starring in Baz Luhrman’s “Elvis.”
Getty Images

The seemingly scarred day was the opposite of what Butler was told the “laid-back, playful” recording session would be.

“I was so nervous and we were recording on real equipment where Elvis recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’,” he told the magazine. “We got down there and it wasn’t that at all. We were recording old school, where all the musicians – and these are the best musicians in the world; our guitarist had actually played guitar with Scotty Moore, who was Elvis’ guitarist – we were recording the whole song.”

Austin Butler and Baz Luhrmann
Austin Butler says friend Leonardo Dicaprio warned him that the famed director would “push you in ways you didn’t know anyone could.”
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However, Luhrmann’s antics were not new to the actor who auditioned for the coveted role for five months. Last month, the “Carrie Diaries” alum told Kelly Clarkson that the director “changed everything” he prepared for his screen test without warning.

“He started filming while I [was] everything,” said the actor on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” “He put me through the wringer. I realize now that he likes to be very spontaneous on set, so he wanted to see if I was going crazy.”

While Luhrmann’s spontaneity didn’t make Butler lose his mind, he spent nearly six months isolated from it in Australia during the pandemic.

Baz Luhrmann
Butler described the audition process as “unlike any audition” he’d done.
Mike Marsland/WireImage

In March 2020, the actor chose to stay Down Under while the rest of the crew flew back home to the United States so as not to “lose momentum”. The star of “Zoey 101” proved that he was committed to the role of the King of Rock and Roll – even if it had a price.

“I didn’t have a hug for three months at one point,” he told VMAN, adding that to fill his time, “he had the entire apartment wallpapered with pictures and a timeline of Elvis’s life.”

“I am immensely grateful to have had the movie and, for lack of a better word, obsession with Elvis, my days,” Butler told the magazine. “It made me feel like there was a reason to get up every morning.”

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