Austin Butler Says All His Singing for ‘Elvis’ “Destroyed My Voice”

Austin Butler’s voice is still a topic of conversation months after Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was released.

While on Friday’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, the Oscar-nominated actor explained that due to all the singing in the film, he probably “destroyed my voice a bit.”

“My vocal cords, it’s a lot raspier now,” he added. “I just trained a lot, you know, and then it turned out that I ended up doing all the singing for that early stuff.”

Since the release of the film in June 2022, Butler has received a great deal of commentary on his voice from people claiming he still sounds like the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the character in which he portrayed in the award-winning movie.

Most recently, viewers noticed the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood actor’s voice sounded very similar to the music legend he played when he accepted the Golden Globe Award for best actor in a drama. “I don’t even think about it. I don’t think I sound like him still, but I guess I must because I hear it a lot,” Butler said after the ceremony, addressing why people may be hearing his voice that way. “I often liken it to when somebody lives in another country for a long time, and I had three years where that was my only focus in life. So I’m sure that there’s just pieces of my DNA that will always be linked in that way.”

Butler told Graham Norton that his publicists also noted to him that people have been talking about his voice on social media. He said, “It really made me self-conscious for a second because I thought, ‘Am I being phony? Is this not my voice?”

The Carrie Diaries star, who just received his first Oscar nomination for best actor in a leading role for his performance in Elvis, also said he’s “getting rid of the accent, but I have probably damaged my vocal cords with all that singing.” He added that “One song took 40 takes.”