Austin Butler "owes a lot" to ex-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens.
Austin Butler says he owes a lot to ex-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens
The 31-year-old actor started dating the 'High School Musical' star in 2011 but the pair called it quits in 2020 and now Austin has admitted the 34-year-old beauty was the one who inspired him to take on the title role of The King in new biopic 'Elvis.'
He told the LA Times: "I was with my partner at the time.[Vanessa], that's right. We'd been together for so long and she had this sort of clairvoyant moment and so I really, I owe her a lot for believing in me."
The comments come just days after the former 'Zoey 101' star - who is now dating model Kaia Gerber - referred to Vanessa as an unnamed "friend" who insisted that he one day had to take on the role of the late 'Hound Dog' singer even before the movie went into production,
He said: "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.' I said, 'Oh, that's such a long shot.' Then my agent called and said, 'So Baz Luhrmann is making an Elvis film …' The hairs just stood up on my arms. It made me go, “All right. It’s Everest. I don’t know if I’m good enough. But I’ve got to give it everything.
"I hired a movement coach, a singing coach and a dialect coach, and I just started working like I had the job. I met with Baz after about a month. And we spent five months trying things. And then eventually I had to do a screen test. I was like, Oh, I don’t have the job?' "
Tagged in Elvis Presley Vanessa Hudgens Austin Butler