Austin Butler’s weight-gain strategy for his role in “Elvis” has us all shook up.
The Oscar-nominated star spoke to Variety about wearing a “body adjustment suit” for his role as the iconic singer, which prompted the interviewer to ask if he gained any weight for the film.
“I did in the beginning,” Butler said, adding that before he landed the role for good, director Baz Luhrmann was “trying to figure out if I could pay older Elvis.”
This prompted Butler’s agent to tell him “to gain some weight,” to see if he could assuage any doubts.
“I’d heard that Ryan Gosling ― when he was going to do ‘Lovely Bones’ ― had microwaved Haagen-Dazs and would drink it, so I started doing that,” he said.
“I would go get two dozen donuts and I’d eat them all,” Butler added, adding that it was “fun for a week or so and then you feel awful with yourself.”
Butler eventually stopped his regimen, as the COVID-19 pandemic soon made shooting everything chronologically “impossible.”
While Butler appears to have shed however many pounds he said he gained in the process, he hasn’t lost the accent he developed to play the “Love Me Tender” crooner.
“I don’t think I sound like him still, but I guess I must ’cause I hear it a lot,” the entertainer said in a video captured by The Hollywood Reporter last month after Butler won a Golden Globe for his performance in the biopic.
“I had three years where that was my only focus in life, so I’m sure that there’s just pieces of my DNA that will always be linked in that way.”
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