To play a baseball player in his new movie, Caught Stealing, Austin Butler used real-life derrière inspiration from some of Major League Baseball’s finest.
Butler, 34, explained the whole thing was the idea of the movie’s director, Darren Aronofsky.
“I actually have a whole section of just baseball players’ asses that he would send me,” Butler said in his Men’s Health cover story, published on Tuesday, August 19. “He was like, ‘Look how thick they are!’ ”
To prepare for the movie, Butler collaborated with trainer Beth Lewis, who worked with Hugh Jackman on Deadpool & Wolverine.
Butler also ate a ton of pizza and beer while prepping because he didn’t want to appear too muscular, which wasn’t as fun as it might sound.
“Drinking has never been my thing,” he said. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”
Butler weighed 150 pounds when he started training for Caught Stealing. Six months later, he was up to 185 pounds.
“I’ve got a whole section of Celine pants that I just can’t even wear anymore,” he said.
Despite his regimented processes, Butler explained he’s actually become less intense about preparing for roles in recent years.
“For a long time, I felt that it had to be a tortured process and I would come out the other side broken,” he admitted. “Rather than just putting parts of yourself away and trying to pretend that they don’t exist, it’s like going into the gross bits of yourself — going into the bits that you don’t want to look at — and finding a way of integrating that into the whole.”
Butler earned an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Elvis Presley in 2022’s Elvis, but he explained how the whirlwind of the experience left him feeling lost.
“It’s done, after three years,” he said. “And then it’s like, ‘Wait, what do I focus on now? What do I read about? What do I watch? What do I like?’ And also, I haven’t talked to my friends. ‘Who do I call?’”
Over time, Butler said he’s learned to rely on his personal connections outside of work when acting becomes too all-encompassing.
“There’s something about filming: Everybody tells you what time to show up, they get you dressed, they show you where your mark is,” he said. “It can be very infantilizing, and it can be very centered on me. It feels better when I’m calling a friend and just going, ‘I don’t need anything from you; I just want to know: Are you okay? Can I do anything for you?’”
Caught Stealing hits theaters August 29.
