Austin Butler Repeatedly Referred to Vanessa Hudgens as a “Friend” and Fans Are NOT Happy

So, Austin Butler referred to Vanessa Hudgens as a “friend” during a recent interview, which is apparently an issue for much of the internet because they used to date.

This moment went down when Austin was chatting about how he landed the role of Elvis during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable, saying, per Page Six, “The month before I heard that Baz was making the movie, I was going to look at Christmas lights with a friend. And there was an Elvis Christmas song on the radio and I was singing along, and my friend looked over at me and goes, ‘You’ve gotta play Elvis!’” He continued, “And then a couple of weeks later, I was playing the piano…that same friend was there and I was playing the piano. She said, ‘I’m serious—you gotta figure out how you can get the rights to a script….’”

The thing is, Vanessa also told this story during an August 2019 appearance on Live With Kelly and Ryan…and it’s clear that she was the “friend” (more accurately, girlfriend) in question.

“It’s so crazy because last December, we were driving along and we were listening to Christmas music, and then an Elvis Presley Christmas song came on. He had just dyed his hair dark—he’s a natural-blonde blonde—and I was looking at him and he was singing along and I was like, ‘Babe, you need to play Elvis. I don’t know how, but I’m serious. You need to play him.’ Then in January, he was sitting at the piano—he’s a musician—and he’s playing and he’s singing and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how, but we need to figure out how you can play Elvis. Like, I don’t know how we get rights or what we do, but you need to play him.’”

Meanwhile, much of Twitter is less than pleased:

Welp. Guess there’s nothing to do but this:

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