Rise to Fame
Butler spent a decade on the Disney and Nickelodeon circuit, minor roles, teen love interest parts, the kind of credits that don't follow you anywhere. What changed everything was a middle-of-the-night audition video, bathrobe, disheveled hair, smartphone propped up in his bedroom, singing "Unchained Melody" for Baz Luhrmann. He got the Elvis role and spent three years building Elvis Presley's voice from scratch. The 2022 biopic earned him a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar nomination, and suddenly a decade of forgettable TV work felt like deliberate preparation.
In the Spotlight
The Elvis voice didn't leave him. He needed a dialect coach after the film just to stop sounding like Elvis Presley, and his speaking voice is still noticeably lower than it was before. His 2025 films, Eddington (as a radical cult leader opposite Joaquin Phoenix) and Caught Stealing (a crime thriller with Zoë Kravitz), both underperformed at the box office. Neither hurt his standing much. He was cast as Lance Armstrong in an upcoming biopic, which suggests the plan is to repeat the full-body transformation and see if it works twice.
Side Notes
A management company rep approached him at the Orange County Fair when he was 13, which is either the least glamorous origin story in Hollywood or the most honest one. There's also the Kaia Gerber overlap: Gerber (Cindy Crawford's daughter) dated Jacob Elordi before Butler, and Elordi went on to play Elvis in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla (2023). Both of Gerber's back-to-back boyfriends ended up playing Elvis Presley.