Earlier this year, on a bright New York morning in April, Austin Butler launched a fragrance in an event space that was mostly mirrors and monochrome. Tiny cakes were nibbled and swabs of scent were handed around as Butler, best known for a total immersion as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, hung about in the shadows.
Butler is a tall waif of a man. He’s had a year of being the centre of attention, from Cannes to the Oscars, and so has practice at hiding in a busy room. And indeed, when Butler introduces his new Yves Saint Laurent concoction — called MYSLF — the first thing you notice is how softly spoken he is. But then, as soon as he has left, you miss him. And that, surely, is a star. When, with minimal effort, leaving a room is like turning its lights out.
A little after Butler pushes MYSLF into the world — that’s M for masculine, YSL for Yves Saint Laurent, F for feminine, the lack of an “E” an orthographical choice — I meet him in a side room. With his unbuttoned shirt hanging loose, I see half his chest. He leans in a lot too, and then I can see two-thirds of his chest. He’s captivating company, despite us kicking off with perfume small talk, something he is entirely new to.
“It starts when you spray it on your skin,” he says, talking about the scent of MYSLF. “It has floral notes. They pop and I smell the orange blossom, and then, as it settles, I smell the patchouli, a more woody scent. It is subtle and warm. A kind of sweetness. And woodiness.” He pauses. “I’m learning how to describe it,” he says, laughing. I say he is doing well. “Thank you, thank you,” he says. He is a sweet man.
Butler was born in California in 1991 — his father works in real estate and his mother was an aesthetician — and by the time he was 13 he had signed up with a manager to help him get into acting. In his teens he was a children’s TV regular — notably guesting on Hannah Montana with Miley Cyrus — but his adult break did not come until 2018, when he starred with Denzel Washington in The Iceman Cometh on Broadway. A hell of a leap that led, in quick succession, to a memorable role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood as a member of the Manson Family and, then, Elvis.
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So he broke out of kids’ TV — something many never manage. Was he ever worried about being in a juvenile rut? “Absolutely,” he says quickly. “There are so many moments of self-doubt. I started acting when I was 12, so it’s been 20 years. That’s wild. And there were many times you have these dreams where you think, ‘I don’t know if it will ever come true.’ So, for me, I had to force myself to figure out, ‘How do you get better?’ That led to me working with Denzel. That really shifted my career. It was such a challenge, working with an absolute titan.”
Does his self-doubt ever pass? “Usually only once ‘Action!’ is called,” Butler says. “When you are completely present in that moment, fear becomes energy, but then, that night, it comes back. And it’s there in the morning.” Is it really like this for everything? “I even felt the same thing on SNL!” he says, meaning when he hosted the comedy show Saturday Night Live. “The week leading up to it was brutally terrifying but it ultimately just means you care. That you care a lot.”
And then, from nowhere, he breaks my heart. In the middle of a shiny, highly orchestrated corporate event, I ask Butler, rather innocuously, about the earliest smells he remembers. Someone had said that a smell paints a million words — is there anything that brings Butler back to a certain place?
“Interestingly,” he says, “it is the orange blossom.” A good company answer, I think — given that orange blossom is one of the ingredients of MYSLF. Then he continues: “Because in my childhood home there was this orange tree in the backyard and I remember so vividly when the tree would bloom. My mother and I would go in the backyard and pick oranges and then go inside to make orange juice.”
“And that,” he adds, “really hit me.”
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Butler’s mother, Lori, died in 2014 — when the actor was 23. Cancer got her and her grieving son cried every night for weeks. He fell into a depression too. Her passing weighs heavily on him. He is 31. Earlier this year, on the campaign trail for an Oscar, the actor spoke at a Q&A about how his wildest dreams were coming true, but that he would still sometimes feel sad. Then, as Americans tend to do, he talked about gratitude. He told a story about how, when his mother was struggling with her mental health, he asked her to write, every day, ten things that she was grateful for. “Then, after she passed,” he continued, “we found journal after journal with thousands of gratitudes. Such as, ‘I’m grateful for olive oil!’ ‘For my fingernails — because I can paint them!’ It was so moving. I can’t express what it meant to me. I didn’t know she had kept it up for years. Suddenly her mind was open to all the beautiful things that were happening.”
He put all of this into his full-bodied, fully throated depiction of Elvis — eerily, the singer’s mother died when he too was 23. And he puts it into his role as a YSL ambassador as well. “Yeah, absolutely,” he tells me, when I ask if the orange blossom memories just make this side hustle mean more. I mention that I googled “Austin Butler fragrance” and that his fans have made car fresheners that, they think, smell like him.
“Are you serious?” Yes. One blurb says: “Austin smells like a soft, warm blend of bergamot, mahogany and musk with notes of lavender and patchouli. The blend is soft and woody with floral undertones.”
“How about that?” he says, shaking his head. “I do like bergamot, but I am slightly worried about mahogany. It makes me think of Ron Burgundy.” (Will Ferrell’s irrepressible character in Anchorman boasts that his apartment “smells of rich mahogany”.)
Next he will star in Masters of the Air — the latest in the occasional Second World War series by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks that started with Band of Brothers. It came about when Hanks — who played Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis — was at dinner with his co-star and said, “You have immersed yourself so deeply in Elvis that, for your mental health, it would be wise to go straight into something else. If you just jump off the train, you might have emotional whiplash . . . And, you know,” Hanks continued, “I’ve got this thing I’m producing .”
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• Read our ★★★★ review of Elvis
Butler laughs. Cheeky Hanks. But that was it and he has carried on working — he also appears, bald-headed, in the sci-fi blockbuster sequel Dune: Part Two later this year. I sense that he likes to be terrified. “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “It’s what I realised doing Elvis — that forced me to go to the very edge of what is possible, and not every experience will be like that. I don’t think I’ll ever have an experience like that again, but if I have to really dig, it makes me feel alive.”
He deserved the Oscar for Elvis, losing out to Brendan Fraser in The Whale. Butler put his all into that role — two years of prep. He would interview himself as Elvis and walk along the beach laughing like Elvis — no wonder he found the accent hard to shift.
There is something, though, of the old-school Hollywood glamour that is innate in him anyway. He even has the supermodel girlfriend: Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter. Most people have only seen him in Elvis garb or the tailored red-carpet-ready suits that he is wearing when we meet, but that is, he says, usually how he is anyway.
“I resonate with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Serge Gainsbourg,” he says. “It’s not about quick fashion — when you look at a photo of McQueen from years ago, you think he could wear that today and look just as cool. Those are the people I look at. I just love this idea of timelessness.”
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How at ease he seems. Which can happen if you experience terrible loss — the frivolities and little things are put into their place. Yes, Butler will talk about the things that Californians like: gratitude, grace, being grounded. And, yes, we’ve met at a perfume launch. But Butler remains down to earth. He knows careers can ebb and flow and that, as an adult, his is really only a few years old.
I end by bringing up something that Butler once said about Presley, that he was a guy who seemingly had everything, but felt alone. Butler is clearly not at the singer’s level yet, but it has been a catapulting year. How will he keep himself OK?
“I’m trying to figure that out,” he says. “One interesting thing is that internally not much changes — it’s just a collective idea of who you are that changes.” From others? “Yes. And then, in every interview, you try to talk about who you actually are, but it’s so complex to try to quantify that.”
He pauses, before standing up to glide away behind a panel and disappear. “I just need to realise how privileged I am,” he says. “And we all are — to have the life that we have.”
YSL MYSLF is available from September 1, £72 for 60ml eau de parfum, yslbeauty.com
