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Austin Butler’s pulling another Christian Bale. Like the Oscar winner before him, who went from American Psycho fit to The Machinist skinny by eating 200 calories a day, Butler has taken on a range of parts that push his body to the limits ever since his breakout role in Elvis. “For a long time, I felt that it had to be a tortured process and I would come out the other side broken,” Butler told Men’s Health in an interview published on August 19. Well, that’s how you end up staying in Elvis voice for an entire year, then. Below, every torturous physical transformation that Butler has undertaken for his “process.”
Drank ice cream for Elvis
Butler’s breakout role as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film, Elvis, saw the singer in his young, heartthrob days through to his middle age. To physically embody the latter, Butler drank ice cream. “I heard that Ryan Gosling, when he was going to do The Lovely Bones, had microwaved Häagen-Dazs and would drink it,” Butler told the Award Circuit podcast in February 2023. “So I started doing that. I would go get two dozen doughnuts and eat them all. I really started to pack on some pounds. It’s fun for a week, and then you feel awful about yourself.”
The next time he undertook a wild transformation was to play villain Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Denis Villeneuve’s 2024 film, Dune: Part Two. He’s bald, he’s strange, and he’s, most important, physically imposing. To get there, Butler trained with a former Navy SEAL named Duffy Gaver. “He just ramps up the weight, so you’re just getting heavier and heavier,” Butler told Men’s Health, describing the process. “I remember him telling me, ‘Chicken, broccoli, brown rice, and lift, motherfuckers.’ ”
To play American WWII pilot Gale “Buck” Cleven in the 2024 Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air, Butler worked with his second Navy SEAL, Captain Dale Dye. “It was really from the ground up,” Butler told BFBS Radio in 2024. “How to march, how to salute, how to work an aircraft.” Dye claimed that, at the beginning, his Brits, including Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan, were “better physical performers” than the Americans, like Butler, per GQ. Through training, they came together. “It wasn’t about making them look great with their shirts off,” Dye added, “but we wanted a certain dexterous physicality so that they could climb in and out of aircraft and maneuver themselves through constricted areas inside an aircraft fuselage.”
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Built a baseball butt for Caught Stealing
Butler plays a former baseball player named Hank Thompson in his next movie, Caught Stealing, directed by Darren Aronofsky and out on August 29. To get that physicality, Butler had to both train hard and eat a lot, and Aronofsky would send Butler tons of photos of baseballers for him to reference. “I actually have a whole section of just baseball players’ asses that he would send me,” Butler told Men’s Health. “He was like, ‘Look how thick they are!’ ” To compare, Butler worked with trainer Beth Lewis and combined eating lots of pizza and drinking beer. In the six months of training, he gained 35 pounds. “I’ve got a whole section of Celine pants that I just can’t even wear anymore,” Butler remarked.
Tightened it up again for Enemies
After Caught Stealing, he plays a killer opposite detective Jeremy Allen White in A24 crime film Enemies. Butler apparently went back to lean. He trained six to seven days each week, per Men’s Health, and ate chicken kabobs, omelets, and an “occasional steak.” With an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe to his name, so far it seems like Butler’s signature transformations are working for his career. Still, maybe someday he’ll meet a nice body type and just settle down.
