Ahead of the release of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, actor Riley Keough, granddaughter to music legend Elvis Presley, shared an early screen test of actor Austin Butler singing Presley’s song "That’s All Right" during a screentest. The actress shared the video to her Instagram. The two-minute and forty-five-second clip sees Butler playing the guitar and hitting the right notes for the hit song, and it is surreal, to say the least.
The actor bagged a 12-minute-long standing ovation during the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Needless to say, Austin’s performance has received rave reviews. Keough told Variety, “I started crying five minutes in and didn’t stop. There’s a lot of family trauma and generational trauma that started around then for our family. I felt honored they worked so hard to really get his essence, to feel his essence. Austin captured that so beautifully.”
While we are yet to see Butler’s iteration of the music legend the director Baz Luhrmann has revealed that the actor was ‘almost born to play it’. In order to seal the deal, the actor sent Luhrmann an audition tape that featured him singing a broken down version of Unchained Melody. The director shared in a previous interview,
The thing about Austin was that he will tell you himself, I didn’t pick him: It’s as if he was drawn, like the role drew him in, because he was almost born to play it. You know, we can talk about it now, he like loses his mom at the same age that Elvis did. He sends a video to me with this thing and… He just happened like two years non-stop living and breathing as Elvis. He’s now going through a sort of, it’s like, deprogramming thing because he’s been a long time since he’s known who he was.”
Elvis, based on the real-life events of the King of Rock and Roll, casts Tom Hanks as his manager Colonel Tom Parker, Helen Thomson as Elvis’s mother, Gladys, Richard Roxburgh as Elvis’s father, Vernon, and DeJonge play his wife Priscilla.
The movie will hit theaters on June 22 worldwide and June 24 in the US. Here’s the synopsis:
Elvis’s story is seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks). As told by Parker, the film delves into the complex dynamic between the two spanning over 20 years, from Presley’s rise to fame to his unprecedented stardom, against the backdrop of the evolving cultural landscape and loss of innocence in America. Central to that journey is one of the significant and influential people in Elvis’s life, Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge)