I’m finding Austin Butler to be a fascinating young(ish) actor. Granted, I’ve only seen him in one performance, the one where he plays a leading man breaking out and desperate to make all the right moves and be taken seriously. But he’s really giving that role all he’s got! Right now Austin is doing double promo duties for his Apple+ series Masters of the Air (out now), and Dune: Part Two premiering March 1. Esquire put him on their March cover, and Austin gave them the kind of extra, overly self-aware yet somehow not self-aware at all interview we’ve come to love and expect from him. A few highlights:

‘The architecture of your mouth’: [Butler] has spoken about how certain face movements and poses are subconsciously adopted and how a voice is just the architecture of your mouth, which can get caught in patterns that make you sound like someone you aren’t. Weren’t. How living as another person — which is exactly what he did — isn’t something you drop, no problem, simply because the cameras are down. He does it again today. “There’s no denying you create habits … I had been practicing one way of using the muscles in my mouth for a long time, so it was a process of trying to unlearn those.”

The quick turnaround from Elvis to Masters: Having a project to distract him from the despair he felt over leaving the titular role was, Butler thought, going to be helpful. “There was something comforting about knowing I could pour myself into something else,” he says. His body had other plans. Three years of spiraling further and further down the rabbit hole of someone else’s psyche and abandoning his own sense of self completely had taken their toll. The morning after production on Elvis ended, at 4:00, he woke up in excruciating pain. Possibly his appendix? Butler was admitted to the hospital. Except it wasn’t his appendix. Or Covid. “My body just crashed.”

Oh good grief: The space between what you want to know about Austin Butler and what he wants to reveal is not a gap but a gulf. A throwaway question like “Do you live in an apartment or a house?” leads to a pause. A house in L.A., he answers at first, and an apartment in New York. “How much do I want to say about this?” he wonders aloud after the admission. I ask him if he’s eaten anywhere good while in town. “This is also hard,” he says in response to my second-easiest question. “I never know when I’m giving my favorite spots away.”

He’s curating his stardom: The thing is, Butler wants to be a particular kind of star. Not just a celebrity. Not just an actor. And he doesn’t want to mess it up. Certainly not by sharing too much. … That desire to probe and share is diametrically opposed, he says, “with the type of career that I want to have, which is to be able to step into all these different types of people. I think of the days of Paul Newman — we didn’t know a ton about his personal life.” It’s like that with a lot of the stars he admires. Leonardo DiCaprio. Christian Bale. Daniel Day-Lewis.

The friend faux pas: Last winter, as his Best Actor campaign began to bubble, it blew up in his face. When asked if he’d always wanted to play Elvis in a movie, Butler answered that “a friend” once told him he was a fit for the part. Except that friend was his former partner of nine years, Vanessa Hudgens, and she had, before and after his casting, posted about it on Instagram. The Internet ate him up, accusing him of downgrading her role in his life. “Oh, yeah, I learned a lesson with that one … I felt that I was respecting her privacy in a way and not wanting to bring up a ton of things that would cause her to have to talk. I have so much love and care for her. It was in no way trying to erase anything.” … The two dated for most of their twenties; their relationship saw the death of both Butler’s mother and Hudgens’s father. It was real, and those moments, as Butler sees it, belong only to them. “I value my own privacy so much,” he says. “I didn’t want to give up anybody else’s privacy.”

[From Esquire]

Where do we start? Austin is way over the top, for sure, but I feel like the interviewer was really meeting him halfway here. Case in point: “A project to distract him from the despair” of finishing Elvis. He’s got his own Greek Chorus with this writer! The part that had me howling the most, though, was his treating the fairly innocuous questions of “where do you live and eat” like he’s an undercover agent tasked with guarding state secrets. “A house in one city, and an apartment in another. CURSES, I’ve said too much!!” I also barked out a laugh at the suggestion that we don’t know anything about Leo DiCaprio’s personal life. Please.

With regards to Vanessa Hudgens, are we buying his explanation? It’s not a (state) secret they dated, nor that she championed him for Elvis. Why would saying “my ex” instead of “a friend” have been betraying her privacy? And finally, “not wanting to bring up a ton of things that would cause her to have to talk,” was… not the best assemblage of words from him.

Photos credit: Robbie Fimmano for Esquire, received via promotional email, Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon