How Austin Butler broke his rib filming Tom Hanks’ ‘Masters of the Air’
Austin Butler famously walked away from “Elvis” with an accent, but his new project gave him a more painful souvenir.
While filming the Apple TV+ World War II drama “Masters of the Air,” produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, Butler, 32, told Variety, “There was a fight scene and yeah, my rib cracked. It hurt and then I had to keep fighting.”
“And it hurts for a long time after because every time you breathe, you feel your ribs,” he continued. “But it could have been worse.”
The series, now streaming (new episodes out Fridays), is about the US Air Force’s 100th bomb group, which was nicknamed “The Bloody Hundredth” for their high volume of casualties.
They were stationed on the coast of England during the war.
Butler stars as Major Gale “Buck” Cleven. The cast also includes “Saltburn’s” Barry Keoghan, “Doctor Who’s” Ncuti Gatwa, Callum Turner and Sawyer Spielberg (Steven’s son).
“Masters of the Air” is Butler’s follow up to Baz Luhrmann’s opulent 2022 musical biopic, “Elvis,” which catapulted the former Disney actor to stardom and earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
It also got Butler widely mocked on social media for still having his “Elvis accent,” long after he’d stopped playing the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
During an appearance this week on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Butler said he only had a week between the two projects, so he got a dialect coach to help him ditch his bizarre Tennessee twang.
“I was just trying to remember who I was, I was trying to remember what I liked to do. All I thought about was Elvis for three years,” he said.
“And then I had that week off and then I flew to London and at that time it was COVID so I’m quarantined for 10 days, so I thought alright just pour all this energy into learning about World War II now,” he went on. “I had a dialect coach just to help me not sound like Elvis in that film, that was the whole thing.”
He also said that he got the job on “Masters of the Air” because of his “Elvis” co-star, Tom Hanks.
“I was having dinner with Tom Hanks in Australia and he was sort of joking saying, ‘You’re going to lose your mind when you finish this three years of your life focused on this one thing, you’re gonna have to find something else to jump right into right afterward.’”
“And the other producer, Pat McCormick, who is a good friend of mine, he said, ‘Well Tom, find him something to do,’ and then Tom said, ‘Well I’ve got this World War II thing I’m working on.’ ”
The “Masters of the Air” cast went through a “boot camp” to learn history, how to march and how to dance, which “really built such bonds between all of us,” Butler told Variety.
The shoot included scenes of forced marches at gunpoint through arctic temperatures. “I remember thinking this is gonna be a long haul,” Butler said.
But, it was helped by Hanks, who gave the cast a “rousing speech” during boot camp, he said.
“The opportunity and the honor of playing these men who we owe such a debt of gratitude to — the privilege outweighed any daunting timeline of it or anything.”
