How Austin Butler’s Unexpected Transformation Could Rewrite the Rules of Stardom—and Your Own Wellness Journey
First it was a virus. That ominous phrase might sound like the start of any epidemic thriller, but for Austin Butler, it marked a harrowing chapter of his life. Right after wrapping up Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2021, he woke up in agony—appendicitis-like pain forcing him to the brink and spending a full week bed-ridden. Just when you’d think that was a tough enough blow, guess what happened next? Temporary blindness mid-flight during The Bikeriders shoot, an eerie sensation that had him convinced he was on the verge of death. And then, as if reality was testing his limits, a nagging foot pain turned out to be a tiny shard of glass lodged inside him for eight long months—a literal grain-of-rice conspiracy against his comfort. You gotta wonder: at what point do we realize that pushing through pain isn’t always the heroic choice, especially when life keeps swiping you with these curveballs? Austin’s journey isn’t just about Hollywood glitz but the gritty reality of balancing health and ambition in an unforgiving industry. Ready to dive deep into the story of a man who’s more than just a star—who’s learning to embrace the messy bits—not just the spotlight? Let’s unpack this wild ride of resilience, transformation, and self-discovery. LEARN MORE
FIRST IT WAS A VIRUS. Austin Butler had just finished filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2021 when he woke up in severe, appendicitis-like pain. He was hospitalized and spent a week in bed.
Next, it was a bizarre episode of temporary blindness. While flying to shoot The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s saga of a Midwestern biker gang, he jolted awake with a terrible migraine just as the plane was landing. He lost his vision for several minutes and felt a euphoric sensation. He suspected he was dying. He willed his sight to come back, and slowly it did; he headed to set and worked the whole day, writing the incident off as a side effect of sleep deprivation.
Then, after the virus and the blindness and the migraine and the feeling like he was dying, it was a sudden terrible pain in his foot that began in South Korea on the press tour for Dune: Part Two, in which he played wraithlike, psychopathic nepo baby Feyd-Rautha. For eight months he walked with his toes curled under to avoid worsening the pain. Finally, a doctor in New York City removed a piece of glass about the size of a grain of rice.
Life often throws down medical spike belts to slow us down. A stressful period at work is punctuated by a fierce head cold; a too-long run gives us a spooky pain in the top of one foot that goes away only when we’re at the podiatrist’s office; a night of one (four) too many margaritas is capped by an immobilizing hangover that leaves us staring apathetically at the ceiling like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, promising ourselves that we’ll lead pure lives henceforth. Where most of us pause after these moments, Butler, now 34, was zooming right on through, his tires deflating and slapping against the road until he lost control of the vehicle.
To Butler, acting had always meant alienation from his body and mind. When he was filming Elvis in 2020 and 2021, he took up the singer’s distinctive lazy drawl to the extent that he required a dialect coach to un-Elvis. The performance earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor, but it also took over his life. He disappeared into the role, he says over dinner at the Chicago steakhouse Bavette’s in June. “And then it’s done, after three years. And then it’s like, Wait, what do I focus on now? What do I read about? What do I watch? What do I like? And also, I haven’t talked to my friends. Who do I call?”
Butler’s career began when he was just a preteen, with appearances in Hannah Montana and a splat of Nickelodeon shows. But his roles matured, incrementally at first—he played a heartthrob in the teen dramatic series Switched at Birth, then a heartthrob in The Carrie Diaries, a young-ified adaptation of Sex and the City—and then all at once. In 2018, he acted alongside Denzel Washington in a Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. He was awed by the writing and by his colleagues and felt like he had to prove himself over and over, every night; he did, earning rave reviews. (“Butler conveys what many of his castmates try to show by shouting and grandstanding: his character’s inner life,” a New Yorker critic wrote.) That was when his career shifted, he recalls. Right after Iceman, he was cast in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and then, upon Washington’s recommendation, he was cast as Elvis.
GET AUSTIN’S LOOK: Sweatpants by Polo Ralph Lauren.
GET AUSTIN’S LOOK: Sweatpants by Polo Ralph Lauren.
The momentum continued. In 2023 he starred in The Bikeriders, and in 2024 he stole scenes in the Apple TV+ World War II miniseries Masters of the Air and in Dune: Part Two. This summer he stars in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, a nail- biting thriller in which an unfortunate encounter forces Butler’s character, a baseball star turned bartender named Hank, to become an everyman action hero. When we meet in Chicago, he’s shooting Enemies, a cat-and-mouse story in which he stars as a killer opposite Jeremy Allen White’s detective. Elvis could have been a too-much-too-soon peak for a young actor, but for Butler, it was merely a springboard into more high-profile and highly varied films.
He had, by most definitions, made it. Having spent his career Free Solo-ing up Hollywood’s sheer granite rock face with white knuckles, he was now able to perch on a ledge and survey the Pridelands. “For a long time, I felt that it had to be a tortured process and I would come out the other side broken,” he says. Acting had meant erasing himself. But he saw glimmers of another way. “Rather than just putting parts of yourself away and trying to pretend that they don’t exist, it’s like going into the gross bits of yourself—going into the bits that you don’t want to look at—and finding a way of integrating that into the whole.” The actor, famous for immersing himself in his roles, decided to go Method on Austin Butler.
By the time he arrived in Chicago to shoot Enemies, he was working to dilute his preoccupation with his work. “It was something that he and I started speaking about almost immediately,” Jeremy Allen White says, remembering a van ride the two shared after their first meeting to talk about Enemies. Butler asked White about playing Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming Deliver Me from Nowhere, and White, who had read interviews with Butler about his obsessive approach to playing Elvis, asked him about that film. “I asked, ‘Can you do that every time and still maintain a life that you’re happy with?’ And he said, ‘No. I don’t think so,’” White recalls. “I think Austin is at this point in his life where doing the best work he can is very important, and I think it always will be, but I think he’s searching for some stability in life as well.”
Maybe he can’t give what he gave to Elvis to every role. But maybe he doesn’t have to.
THE TALES OF Butler’s Elvis immersion led me to anticipate a dark, brooding creative, but he is ceaselessly pleasant to everyone around him. In Chicago, he and White have been shooting at night, but when the two stroll around during waking hours, it can feel as if the city is watching them on Find My Friends. They recently attended a Cubs game, and since then, Butler says, “we walk down the street and people say, ‘How was the Cubs game?’ ” He says he has reoriented his mind to think of Chicago as a giant neighborhood and everyone in it as a friend, which seems to be how he greets the world at large.
“I know Austin has this fascination with, you know, the movie star. I think his idols growing up are a lot of people who he’s now worked with, like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Joaquin Phoenix, and I think what I was most struck by is that he does move through the world with an incredible amount of ease and grace,” White observes. “He’s got a real quiet gentleness and curiosity to him, and a real comfort that reminds me of those movie stars.”
When he arrived at Bavette’s on a Friday evening, he was walking alongside a woman with long, wavy brown hair, a gorgeous remora whom he appeared to have met en route. At the door to the restaurant, he asked her for her name and told her it was nice to meet her. She smiled as she continued down the sidewalk but otherwise seemed unruffled—her chill should be studied. I wondered whether she had taken Butler for an anonymous Midwestern hunk: He was wearing a white T-shirt and had chosen a fighter from his lineup of baseball hats, this one from the 1996 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. But everyone seems calm around Butler.
Some alchemy occurs when people share a meal with him. Repeatedly, when I ask him how he came by certain parts, he answers with some variation of: I went to [meal] with [director], and the next day he called me to tell me he had the perfect role for me. Ari Aster, who directed Butler in the role of a cult leader in this summer’s pandemic ensemble drama Eddington, met him at a dinner and found him to be both surprisingly funny and disarmingly sincere. “He’s also easy to make laugh, which I’m a sucker for,” Aster wrote in an email. “I disappeared into his eyes at multiple points in the conversation and reemerged with the conviction that he’d be a perfect cult leader. I was already a member.”
Once we ordered—he got a wedge salad, a shrimp cocktail, and a 10-ounce filet mignon—Butler expressed concern that the restaurant, which he had selected, was too loud for my recorder. The recorder was fine, but Butler still spent the first half-hour of our time hunched over the table, leaning into where it sat. He was polite and curious, turning many questions back on his suddenly flustered interviewer.
“It’s not an act for a journalist,” Aronofsky says in a Zoom interview. “He’s just very, very considerate.” The director remembers when someone brought pizza to set while they were shooting in Brooklyn. There wasn’t enough for everyone, he recalls, but out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Butler giving his slice away, prompting a lecture from Aronofsky about making sure he was getting enough calories.
Caught Stealing, like Aronofsky’s Black Swan, is a dilated, twisted portrait of a single character’s psyche. When I ask the director what it takes for an actor to star in such internal films, he says, “Certain people are born where you can see inside them with their faces, because of how their muscles land on their face. They probably wouldn’t make good poker players, because they can be read so easily.” Posing on the red carpet, Butler often slackens his face into a relaxed smolder, but in conversation, his face is subtly animated, occasionally delivering a big, goofy grin. He’s a rewarding listener, without the performative aspect of some people who consider themselves good listeners. He seems, as Aster observed, unusually sincere.
Butler, who grew up in Orange County, California, says he inherited his curiosity from his parents. His father, a commercial real estate appraiser, would talk to every stranger, and the actor describes his mother, who ran a daycare and who died of cancer in 2014, as someone who connected easily—someone “never on the periphery.” Butler explains that those connections have lately become a grounding mechanism for him. “There’s something about filming: Everybody tells you what time to show up, they get you dressed, they show you where your mark is. It can be very infantilizing, and it can be very centered on me,” he says. “It feels better when I’m calling a friend and just going, ‘I don’t need anything from you; I just want to know: Are you okay? Can I do anything for you?’ ”
Acting is a good fit for someone who enjoys losing himself in the lives of others—sometimes obsessively, as with Elvis. But evaluating your own life, deciding what you want to amplify and what you want to suppress, is much harder.
AFTER MULTIPLE PHYSICAL meltdowns, Butler tried to take better care of his body, even amidst training and filming. He trained assiduously and ate restrictively for Dune: Part Two, guided by trainer and former Navy Seal Duffy Gaver toward a shredded Voldemort aesthetic. “He just ramps up the weight, so you’re just getting heavier and heavier,” Butler recalls of Gaver’s methods. “I remember him telling me, ‘Chicken, broccoli, brown rice, and lift, motherfuckers.’ ”
For Caught Stealing, he had the unusual challenge of transforming himself into a former baseball player: He had to look athletic but not too Marvel. Aronofsky would send him pictures of baseball players for reference. “I actually have a whole section of just baseball players’ asses that he would send me,” Butler says. “He was like, ‘Look how thick they are!’ ” Aronofsky wanted it to look believable when Hank starts sprinting through the streets, arms slicing the air as he runs from two mobsters. But he wanted Hank to look like a bartender with a drinking problem too. So Butler worked out hard with trainer Beth Lewis, who prepped Hugh Jackman for Deadpool & Wolverine, but he also ate constantly—a lot of pizza—and drank beer so he wouldn’t appear overly cut. (“Drinking has never been my thing,” he says after ordering a soda and bitters with dinner. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”) He loved training with Lewis, who had him balancing on a BOSU ball and doing one-arm kettlebell moves, because the movements felt functional and likely to benefit him in his everyday life and in his later years.
Despite having slammed doughnuts and drunk melted ice cream to play Elvis, Butler says that when he began meeting with Aronofsky, he was very slight—it was awards season, he explains, and when he gets nervous or anxious, he sometimes forgets to eat. He weighed 150 pounds when he started training, and six months later, he was up to 185. After “a ton of hip thrusters,” he achieved the mandatory tokus. “I’ve got a whole section of Celine pants that I just can’t even wear anymore,” he says woefully.
At dinner, though, he looks chiseled. He has a young face, but he trained for Enemies six or seven days a week and subsisted on omelets, chicken kebab, and the occasional steak, sharpening his jaw and cheekbones. As he speaks, he compulsively pushes one sleeve of his T-shirt up onto his shoulder until the sleeve stays accordioned, each time revealing biceps like a bell curve.
He appears well rested, too, in spite of a filming schedule that seems designed to doom his circadian rhythms. A few nights before our meeting, he says, Enemies finished shooting early in the morning. He can have difficulty falling asleep after filming, he says, and while previously he might have put on a movie and tried to relax his mind that way, this time he went to the gym, got on a treadmill, set it to a steep incline, and walked on it for half an hour before hitting the sauna. After a cold shower, he slept deeply. He borrowed this protocol from Tom Hardy, whom he worked with on The Bikeriders: After shooting all night, Hardy would go home, put on a weighted vest, and do 1,000 box jumps. “I’m just trying to find little things like that,” Butler says. When he wakes up in the afternoon, for instance, he makes sure to step out on his balcony to get some sun. “Sometimes it’s the mundane little things.”
Small as those moments of peace may be, they mark a radical shift toward balance for the actor. Since he was a teenager, he’s been working to establish himself as a movie star. One might think that now, with an Oscar nomination and the best directors in Hollywood eager to work with him, he can relax. But ambitious people in many fields often find themselves at the crossroads where Butler recently arrived, and not all of them manage to find the middle path between the autobahn of a work-centric life and the pleasant country lane of leisure. Many burn out trying.
But Butler has a court of ready mentors in Hollywood; he seems to find allies wherever he goes. He met the actor Laura Dern, for instance, at an event. “It was like the whole room just quieted, and we connected on a soul level,” he says. “We felt like kindred spirits.” Losing his mother in 2014 was profoundly difficult for him, and he saw serendipitous threads between her and Dern. “My mom was even told that she looked like Laura Dern, and so as soon as I see her, it’s like: She looks like my actual mom.”
He says Dern has taught him that when he’s playing dark roles—or “exploring the shadow self,” as he puts it—it doesn’t have to destroy the rest of his life. “She’s helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side, and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesized, and metabolized. It can be therapeutic, in a way.”
He finds that he can get a full night’s sleep, spend a few minutes resting in the sun, and phone a friend without compromising his performance. An episode of temporary blindness after a shoot is not a prerequisite for a thriving career. “You don’t have to destroy the light.”
Lightning Round
Movie you rewatch the most?
The Big Lebowski
Frenemy exercise?
The assault bike
Workout anthem?
“Lose Yourself” by Eminem
Killer robot activation song?
“Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger” by Daft Punk
Cheat meal?
French toast, pancakes, pizza, and pasta, all at the same time
Favorite book?
Consolations by David Whyte, or Another Country by James Baldwin
Most exciting phrase in the English language?
That first time you hear somebody that you really care about say, “I love you”
GET AUSTIN’S LOOK: Polo Ralph Lauren sweatpants, vintage necklace.
Fashion Director: Ted Stafford.
Stylist: Ryan Hastings.
Stylist Assistants: Margaret Galvin and Jaemi Rowe.
Grooming: Jamie Taylor for A-Frame.
Set Design: Michael Sturgeon for Monday Artists.
Tailoring: Jessica Yuen for Bedford Street Laundry.
Production: Crawford & Co.
Location: The 1896.
Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton
DP, Video: Derrick Saint Pierre
Editor, Video: Kyle Orozovich
Editor, BTS: Elyssa Aquino
Camera, Video: Bryan Nunez
AP, Video: Janie Booth
This story appears in the September 2025 issue of Men’s Health.
Lauren Larson is a writer and editor based in Austin and her work also appears in GQ, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times.
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