Austin Butler once again embraced method acting for his latest movie role.
In a new interview, the 34-year-old Oscar-nominated actor revealed that while filming his new thriller Caught Stealing, he spent the night in the New York City apartment set where his character Hank lives.
Keep reading to find out more…“For one night, I had the whole apartment to myself,” Austin told Variety. “I played music, I danced around, and I ate Chinese food in there.”
“It made me feel like I really lived there,” he continued. “I slept there all night, and I woke up to the crew coming in while I was in my underwear.”
Austin went on to share that the sleepover helped him fully immerse himself into the role.
“It made it feel like it wasn’t a set anymore,” he said. “There are many things that conspire against you when you’re making a movie. You’ve got the lights and the camera and the set doesn’t have a ceiling, because they’ve got to light it from above. It’s tempting to look around and break the illusion. So the more I can do to trick myself, the more important it is.”
While in the past he has had to go through some extreme physical transformations for roles, Caught Stealing forced Austin to play closer to who he really is.
“It scared me,” he admitted. “One of the reasons I got into acting in the first place was that I am very shy. Getting to play characters let me put on this other skin and put on this other voice and become this other person. That made me feel free. But playing a character that feels more like myself left me with nowhere to hide and made me feel vulnerable.”
In the movie, Austin‘s character Hank is an ex-baseball player turned bartender, so he did make some changes to his workout routine and diet.
“He needed to have the physicality of somebody who was an elite athlete, but who was no longer in peak physical shape,” Austin explained. “I wanted to have a certain thickness. So I worked out, but I also drank a lot of beer.”
Also in the new interview, director Darren Aronofsky noted that Austin sometimes gets too enthralled in the character he’s playing.
“Austin goes really deep,” Darren explained. “In fact, I often asked him to work a little less hard and to relax a little bit because I wanted a certain looseness.”
“I wanted to make a film about someone people can relate to,” the Emmy-winning filmmaker added. “Hank is a pretty good guy. He’s not hurting anyone. He’s just a small town boy in a big city, and the world kind of crumbles around him. It’s nice to have a hero who doesn’t have a cape and is a normal person.”
In another recent interview, Austin shared which two actors helped him pull back on the method acting.
Caught Stealing hits theaters on Friday, August 29. Watch the trailer here!
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