The movie Austin Butler watched every day for a week: “I find that absolutely compelling”
The transition from child star to established adult actor is one that’s tripped up many aspiring talents over the years, but Austin Butler has already proven beyond any doubt that he never had any intention of becoming one of them.
Anointed as one of the fastest-rising young stars in Hollywood, Butler shot to mainstream prominence for his Academy Award-nominated lead performance in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, even if the after-effects did have the unwanted causality of turning him into something of a meme.
He immersed himself so deeply into the character of Elvis Presley for so long that he needed help coming out of it, and it’s already reached a point where every new part he plays leads to jokes being made about the lengths he’s willing to go to in order to transform every fibre of his existence.
Matters weren’t helped when Jacob Elordi revealed that his preparations for playing Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla amounted to watching Lilo & Stitch and eating ridiculous amounts of bacon, a far cry from Butler’s three-year journey of living every waking moment as ‘The King’.
Still, it showcases a steadfast commitment to giving everything to his craft, which was readily apparent in his unsettling recent turn as the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Denis Villeneuve’s spectacular Dune: Part Two. There had to be something that convinced Butler that he was willing to go to those lengths in service of acting, and it turns out that it’s identical to another generation-defining talent.
Nicolas Cage revealed that James Dean and East of Eden was what made him fall in love with film acting in the first place, a sentiment reciprocated by Butler in an interview with A.Frame, where he admitted he “watched that film every day for a week”. His first viewing came “just as I was starting to have the spark of wanting to become an actor” at 11 or 12 years old, and it was set in stone from that moment forward.
Like many before him – and no doubt after, too – “watching James Dean really blew my mind”. Calling East of Eden an “obsession,” its impact is clear in the way Butler commits 100% of himself to any character he plays, regardless of how much or how little screentime he ends up with in the final cut.
Dean’s Caleb Trask was “so animalistic” and “so incredibly present” that the youthful Butler found it “absolutely compelling”. There aren’t many talents to have made such a monumental impact on the profession of acting in such a short space of time as the East of Eden, Giant, and Rebel Without a Cause icon, underlined by the fact it had a similar effect on both Butler and Cage decades apart.
