Elvis May Have Left The Building, But His Accent Stayed With Austin Butler

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

A simple phrase, but actor Austin Butler admits it took him a while not to use his Elvis voice when talking. That’s after he spent months developing it for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic. To shake it, he had to hire a dialect coach.

On Wednesday’s The Late Show, Butler talked to host Stephen Colbert about the difficulty of shaking the accent when it came time to film his next project, the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air.

“It was a lot,” Butler said. “I was just trying to remember who I was. I was trying to remember what I liked to do. All I thought about was Elvis for three years.” He added, “I had a dialect coach just to help me not sound like Elvis in that film.”

Butler immersed himself in Elvis’s voice archives.

“I’d hear him say a certain word and I would clip just that bit out so I knew how he said that word,” Butler said. “I created my own archive of how he said every word and every diphthong, and the way that he used musicality in his voice.”

Butler’s Elvis performance won him a Golden Globe and earned him an Oscar nomination.