Austin Butler Says His Voice Is “Destroyed” From Singing & Talking Like Elvis

While awaiting the end of awards season with the upcoming SAG and Academy Awards, Austin Butler is back on television talking about his Golden Globe-winning role as Elvis Presley in the biopic Elvis.

To get ready for this life-changing role, Butler immediately hired a movement coach and a vocal coach to get him ready to play one of the most unique figures this world has ever seen. Presley had such a different speaking and singing voice that needed to be perfected for a performance to even be considered decent. For over two years, Butler trained diligently to try and mimic Elvis’s deep, southern voice. For a kid from Anaheim, California, this was no easy feat.

While doing press for the movie, fans have noticed that bits and pieces of Presley are still with Butler. Any time the actor speaks in an interview, it goes viral for people accusing him of still using the “Elvis accent.” People have gone as far as creating videos comparing his voice form many years ago to now. He even poked fun at himself during his SNL monologue.

But, as award season progresses, he is doing more interviews, giving people more of a chance to razz him. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, the British host brought up the fact that people think he’s kept the Elvis voice, but Norton says he hears less of it now, which pleased Butler!

Norton joked, “Have you gone to a speech therapist?”

Butler laughed, but then said, “There are people who pull clips from when I was 17…I mean to be honest…my publicist told me, ‘You know people are talking about your voice,’ and these sorts of things. and it really made me self-conscious for a second because I thought, ‘Am I being phony? Is this not my voice?'”

He then said he started to “think consciously” about speaking without sounding like Elvis.

“But my voice sounds different when I talk to my dog or when I talk to my dad or when I’m here right now you know we all have different bits of ourselves that we’re releasing,” he said. “But when I was really questioning it, I thought, ‘Okay for one thing I’m older now.’ Maybe sometimes I have a southern twang but I’m not, I don’t think this is Southern.”

Butler added, “If I tried to sound like Elvis, I would sound very different right now. The other thing is I think from all the singing I probably have destroyed my voice a bit, you know, my vocal cords. It’s a lot raspier now and   I just trained a lot…I trained a lot and and then it turned out that I ended up doing all the singing for that that early stuff.”

We can only imagine what kind of damage adding the signature raspy Elvis sound can do to someone’s vocals cords. We will say, he does sound less like Elvis in this interview than he has in past interviews! Watch it below.