‘Elvis’: Does Austin Butler Really Sing in the Movie?

Austin Butler is the great revelation of the year thanks to ‘Elvis’, Baz Luhrmann’s musical about the life of Elvis Presley that has become one of the best films of 2022, but surely many viewers left the cinema asking the same question: does Austin Butler really sing? And the answer cannot be answered with just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

The actor (whom we recently saw in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’) plays the King of Rock and Roll in this film, which focuses on the complicated relationship between the singer and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks). Through his great musical successes, his stage in the cinema, his love life and his emblematic residence in Las Vegas in the last years of his life, Luhrmann draws an electrifying portrait that is already counted among The best biopics in the history of cinema.

However, the credit goes largely to Butler, who appears to have been possessed by the spirit of Elvis Presley. In addition to learning all of the singer’s iconic dance moves, the 30-year-old actor worked with numerous vocal instructors to nail the King’s unmistakable voice. But… what about the songs?

“Anything ’50s, that’s me,” Butler said in an interview with USAToday, where he explained that each stage of Elvis Presley’s career had its vocal peculiarities. And some were more acceptable than others. “Thereafter [los 50]it’s a mixture of my voice and Elvis’s… On ‘Suspicious Minds’ especially, I can’t tell where my voice ends and his begins”.

In this camera test we can see Austin Butler playing early Elviswhich, as he explained, is the closest to his own voice and that he was able to interpret in its entirety in the film:

When the story comes to Vegas, his voice had to be mixed with that of Elvis himself to achieve the most realistic effect possible. This was explained by the actor in an interview with Entertainment Weekly: “I sang every day [mientras me preparaba y filmaba] and I did my singing exercises first thing in the morning. It is really like a muscle. During the shoot, I started noticing that I could hit notes that I couldn’t get to at first, all of a sudden now I could hit those notes. I was expanding my vocal range. But it’s not just singing, you have to find certain vocal mannerisms as well. That could be a bit tricky.”

The truth is that Austin Butler already came with a musical background that helped him face this challenge. The actor plays the guitar and has been studying music since he was 13 years old. “Music has always been a part of my life, but always a very private thing,” he said on EW. “It was just my own form of therapy. I knew that the aspect of singing [en ‘Elvis’] It was going to be something where I really wanted to give it my all.” Of course, In this video from the official account of the film, he shows us that he knows how to play the guitar divinely.:

Definitely, ‘Elvis’ will change Butler’s life, and it’s not hard for us to see him among the nominees for the 2023 Oscars. In addition, she will soon be seen in the large cast of ‘Dune: Part 2’ playing Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and also in the miniseries ‘Masters of the air’ alongside Barry Keoghan and Callum Turner. For now, this is the year of Elvis Presley and all the joys it will bring to the young act.

As the critic of the film in FOTOGRAMAS says: “It plunges us into an epic, compulsive and frenetic spiral that envelops and embraces, that shakes and convulses to the sound of the construction and deconstruction of one of the great icons of popular culture that is part of the collective memory and that, for a once, has a great movie to rise to the occasion”.