Grief, depression and the moment Austin Butler’s life changed forever
Austin Butler is now established as a household name, having starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis. However, Butler came up through the cinema ranks via children’s and young adult TV shows and movies. Reflecting on this journey, the actor recently discussed the early part of his career in a roundtable alongside the likes of Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser and Adam Sandler. “I started when I was about 12 years old, and I just stumbled into doing extra work,” Butler said. “I was an incredibly shy kid, and if that kid knew that I was sitting around all my heroes right now, talking like this in public, [he] wouldn’t believe it, you know.”
Butler admitted to being so shy that he would have his mother order for him in restaurants. Evidently, at a young age, he was struggling to find his identity. “I didn’t really have a thing that I felt I could really express myself through,” he said. “And then somehow, I ended up on this set, and I always loved movies, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.”
Acting was always hidden deep within Butler, but he acknowledged that he owes his mother for all his present success. “She quit her job, and she drove me to auditions, took me to acting classes,” he said. “And going through that process, that’s what allowed me to start to break the shell and realise that all those times that I’m self-conscious or insecure. So if I can get my attention off myself and onto how I’m trying to affect someone else, then I’m not self-conscious; I’m other-conscious.”
In light of that, it’s tragic that Butler lost his mother at a young age, around 24 or 25, and the grief left him in a deep pit of depression. “I’d never experienced pain like that before,” he noted, “And I started to question these people who were hurting a lot, and I thought, ‘Is this a noble profession at all? Should I be doing this, or should I give myself in some way that can help people who are dealing with cancer or something like that?'”
However, Butler stuck with acting for a short while, at least. He was filming a young adult fantasy show in New Zealand, although things were personally turbulent for him. “I would go home and cry every night,” he said. “I was dealing with grief, but it was also this feeling that it wasn’t aligned with something that felt truly fulfilling.”
He continued: “I got done with that show and said that I would rather not work as an actor than to ever do something like that”.
Butler decided to take some time off and thought about making films rather than acting in them, although he was “sinking into a deeper and deeper depression … I wasn’t getting the opportunities I wanted, so I really thought I’ll just quit”.
Eventually, though, Butler’s agent called and suggested he audition for Denzel Washington’s Broadway show The Iceman Cometh. In order to make his audition tape stand out, Butler thought: “I’m gonna film this like a movie. I’m gonna give it everything I got.”
He concluded: “I went in the room, they gave me the job, and that was the moment that changed my career.“
