Austin Butler slept overnight on film set to prepare for his Caught Stealing role

Austin Butler slept overnight on a film set to prepare for his role in Caught Stealing.

The 33-year-old Elvis star, who has become famous for his immersive approach to acting, plays Hank, a former baseball player turned bartender living in New York’s East Village in the new thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Speaking about the preparation, he was quoted by Variety saying: “For one night, I had the whole apartment to myself. I played music, I danced around, and I ate Chinese food in there.

“It made me feel like I really lived there. I slept there all night, and I woke up to the crew coming in while I was in my underwear.

“It made it feel like it wasn’t a set anymore. 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.”

Unlike his roles in Elvis, in which he adopted the voice and mannerisms of Elvis Presley, or Dune: Part Two, for which he trained with a Navy SEAL to play Feyd-Rautha, Austin said his role in Caught Stealing felt closer to his true self.

He admitted: “It scared me. 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.”

To embody Hank, Austin also worked on his physicality.

He said: “He needed to have the physicality of somebody who was an elite athlete, but who was no longer in peak physical shape.

“I wanted to have a certain thickness. So I worked out, but I also drank a lot of beer.”

Filmmaker Darren, 55, first pitched Caught Stealing to Austin during the 2022 awards season, when they were both promoting films.

The director was then attending with his movie The Whale, which later won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, while Austin was nominated for Elvis.

Darren said about his Caught Stealing star: “Austin goes really deep. In fact, I often asked him to work a little less hard and to relax a little bit because I wanted a certain looseness.”

The film, adapted from a graphic novel, is set in 1990s New York.

Its plot follows Hank as he agrees to look after a neighbour’s cat, only to become entangled in a violent battle between police, the Russian mob and Hasidic hitmen over a key.

Darren added: “I wanted to make a film about someone people can relate to. 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.”