Austin Butler Divulges 'Awful' Way He Packed on the Pounds to Prepare for 'Elvis'

Apparently he used the same weight gain method as Ryan Gosling.

Austin Butler definitely had his work cut out for him while preparing to play Elvis Presley, even when it came to his body weight.

The Oscar-nominated actor, who starred in the 2022 Elvis biopic, recently opened up about the lengths he went to in order to pack on some weight for the role, considering he played the King of Rock 'n' Roll at various times in his life.

In a recent interview with Variety, Butler, 32, revealed that he was inspired by Ryan Gosling's weight gain method for The Lovely Bones, which involved consuming a lot of ice cream—but not in its usual form.

"I'd heard that Ryan Gosling when he was going to do 'The Lovely Bones,' had microwaved Häagen-Dazs and would drink it," he stated. "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 or so," he said, but then "you feel awful about yourself."

The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor also said that Elvis was originally supposed to film in chronological order of the entertainer's life, although that plan "quickly went out the window."

"That was another one of the tricky aspects of the film was Elvis changed so much from the time he was 19 to 42," he explained. "One day we'd be in 1974 and the next day we'd be in 1956. So you got to be able to switch back and forth, vocally and physically."

In addition to changing his physique, Butler also did a lot of work to master Elvis' famous voice, which many say caused his own voice to get permanently deeper since the film.

While it's still up for debate whether or not his voice has actually changed, there's no question that Butler was very intense about his preparation for the role.

“There wasn’t a conversation for three years, or a film or a book or anything that I ingested or talked or thought about, that wasn’t related to Elvis,' he previously told IndieWire. “He got woven into the fiber of my being in a way, and it feels like a great gift to me that I have little bits of him in my DNA now."

All of Butler's hard work seems to have paid off, as he was named Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama at the 2023 Golden Globes last month. He is also up for Best Actor at the upcoming Academy Awards, alongside competitors Brendan Fraser, Colin Farrell, Nill Nighy and Paul Mescal.

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