On the day of Austin Butler’s final screen test for “Elvis,” director Baz Luhrmann threw everything at him.
Butler had spent five months building up to that moment, workshopping the role with Luhrmann, doing hair and make-up tests, rehearsing the songs. Against the odds, Butler had emerged as the unlikely favorite to land the role over more established names like Harry Styles, Miles Teller and Ansel Elgort. But it wasn’t official yet.
And during the screen test, Luhrmann flipped the script. Some of the scenes Butler had prepped went out the window. In others, Luhrmann fed him lines from behind the camera. The one minute of “Suspicious Minds” that Butler was to perform in a Presley jumpsuit stretched to six.
“I got home and I really thought: ‘I don’t think I got that. I felt like my hands were tied behind my back,’” Butler said in a recent interview.
A week later in Los Angeles, the 30-year-old actor’s phone rang. Luhrmann was calling from Australia.
