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Austin Butler shares his secret to packing on the pounds for “Elvis”.
In an interview with Variety, the 31-year-old actor explained how he learned a tip from a fellow Hollywood star when he needed to gain weight to play an older version of Elvis.
“I heard that Ryan Gosling when he was going to do ‘The Lovely Bones,’ had microwaved Häagen-Dazs and would drink it,” Butler states.
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“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. But we were planning on shooting chronologically in the beginning. That quickly went out the window with COVID. It was just impossible.”
Butler landed the titular role before the COVID-19 pandemic halted the film’s production which was taking place in Australia in March 2020, however, the actor stayed committed to the project.
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He discussed how the film’s director, Baz Luhrmann, attempted to convince him to return to the U.S. due to the film’s hold.
“I’m not gonna go back,” Butler responded. “So it meant I had to rent an apartment myself because all the corporate cards got shut down. They couldn’t even pay for my apartment. I said I’m just going to move to Australia because I knew that if I came back here, I’d lose the momentum that I had.”