Baz Luhrmann recalls Austin Butler’s tearful, bathrobe-clad Elvis audition

It appears some good things may, in fact, happen after 2 A.M. In a new interview with Vulture, director Baz Luhrmann shares what caught his eye about Austin Butler while sifting through an initial round of Elvis auditions. According to Luhrmann, a bathrobe, “Unchained Melody,” a late-night setting, and some good old-fashioned tears all came together for a very memorable self-tape.

“I got sent this strange video of this young guy, and he’s in a bathrobe and he’s singing ‘Unchained Melody’ and he’s crying and then he walks off-camera,” Luhrmann recalls. “I’m like, Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

The young guy in the strange video, as it turns out, was Austin Butler. By Luhrmann’s own account, Butler, a “relative unknown” at the time, lost his mother at a similarly young age as Elvis—the very inspiration for the unplanned self tape.

“Apparently he sent in another video earlier to audition for Elvis. But he woke up in a nightmare thinking that he had done a terrible audition, and he was thinking about his mother, and he thought, What if I sing “Unchained Melody” to Mom?” Luhrmann reveals. “[Butler] goes downstairs in the middle of the night with an iPhone and he records himself doing it. And his agent, James, said, ‘You’ve got to send it in,’ and he does.”

From there on, Luhrmann says it was all about selling the studio on Butler, and preparing him for the long journey ahead. The exhausting process of filming Elvis has been well documented; Butler was reportedly hospitalized the day after production wrapped. Despite expecting Butler to give his all, Luhrmann also says he was always focused on making things work for the actor—after all, performance is Luhrmann’s real cinematic god.

“My No. 1 devotion is always to performers above and beyond everything else, because when the cameras roll, the whole thing is resting on the actors’ shoulders,” Luhrmann explains. “No matter what I do, it’s resting on their shoulders. And history will look back and understand the weight that rested on this young man’s shoulders.”