Austin Butler is spitting out the facts. A year after facing immense backlash for not crediting ex-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens for inspiring him to play the Elvis role. On February 6, during an interview with Esquire the actor revealed why he hasn’t credited her by name instead referring to her as a “friend.” Check out the real reason behind it.
Austin Butler said he was respecting her privacy
The 32-year-old was outside, “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.”
Moreover, the Dune: Part 2 who dated Vanessa from 2011 to 2020. The actor who played the role of Elvis Presley in the Baz Luhrmann-directed movie Elvis which also earned him a Golden Globes shared a shorter version of the story.
Previously, the actor said during the Hollywood Reporter’s Actors Roundtable last January, “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 got to play Elvis.’”
Butler and Hudgens parted ways in 2019, Butler is currently dating model Kaia Gerber, while Hudgens married baseball player Cole Tucker last year.
Previously, the 35-year-old actress also recounted insisting the actor take on the role of King Of Rock & Roll during an August 2019 episode of Live! With Kelly and Ryan.
“Last December, we were driving along and we were listening to Christmas music, and then an Elvis Presley Christmas song came on,” Hudgens said. “He had just dyed his hair dark. He’s a natural blonde, and I was looking at him and he was singing along and I was like, ‘Babe, you need to play Elvis.’”
However, Hudgens’s push has a pretty remarkable mark on the actor’s career as it earned him his first Oscar nomination. In addition, the actor even struggled a lot to get rid of the legend’s voice.
“There’s no denying you create habits,” he recalled to Esquire. “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.”
Also Read: Austin Butler Had to Hire a Dialect Coach to Get Rid of Elvis Presley’s Accent
