How Laura Dern helped Austin Butler stop method acting for ‘Caught Stealing’
Spoiler: the two play mother and son in the film, but Dern was equally a mentor in real life
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Warning: spoilers ahead for ‘Caught Stealing‘.
‘CAUGHT STEALING’ IS A LOT of things, but one surprising thing you’ll want to do after leaving the crime caper is call your mother. Austin Butler plays the perfect son in Hank Thompson, who, despite being chased by mobsters all day, always has a moment to give his mum a dial. He’s a “good country boy”, as Zoë Kravitz’s Yvonne called him in the film. He’s from California, he clarified.
If you didn’t catch it from the mother and son’s first phone call, Laura Dern played his mother. This isn’t the Big Little Lies actor’s first rodeo doing a voice cameo; she voiced Michael Imperioli’s ex-wife in The White Lotus season two, lest we forget, who he kept bugging all the way from Italy.
At first, I thought director Darren Aronofsky would follow a similar act, letting Dern’s character be an omnipresent figure. Even during the film’s last few minutes as a deliveryman leaves a box full of cash that Hank sent in front of her house, it cuts just as she opens the door. I wish Aronofsky had kept it at that.
How Austin Butler’s method acting started
Anyway, starring in Caught Stealing was the first project where Butler dropped his method acting schtick. The former Disney and Nickelodeon stalwart adopted the Lee Strasberg school of acting – the practice of inhabiting a character on and off screen – when he starred in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2022. The role would earn him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination and a place amongst the new generation of leading men. To everyone’s surprise, he couldn’t seem to shake his take (important distinction) on the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s baritone voice in later roles and interviews.
Butler became instantly memeable. His next big break came in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, playing the psychopathic crown prince Feyd-Rautha. Even as an alabaster, dolphin-smooth alien, he still retained that grainy, pack-a-day voice.
Laura Dern was a mother to Austin Butler on and off screen
That’s why his performance in the crime caper seems so fresh: he finally dropped the act. Thanks to Dern, he revealed in a recent interview with Men’s Health, she’s been a mentor to the 34-year-old. “It was like the whole room just quieted, and we connected on a soul level,” he says of meeting Dern at an event. “We felt like kindred spirits.” Butler also shared how his mother, who passed away in 2014, shared a likeness to the 58-year-old actor. “My mum was even told that she looked like Laura Dern, and so as soon as I see her, it’s like: She looks like my actual mum.”
The interview doesn’t mention their working relationship in Caught Stealing. Instead, he talked about how she’s taught him that when he’s playing dark roles (which he called “exploring the shadow self”), it doesn’t have to permeate the rest of his life. “She’s helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side,” he said, “and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesised, and metabolised. It can be therapeutic, in a way.”
The gendered practice of method acting
It’s also worth mentioning that the acting practice is only popular amongst male actors. Daniel Day-Lewis famously spent his off-time in a wheelchair to get in the zone for My Left Foot, where he played the Irish playwright Christy Brown, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth. When Jared Leto was cast in The Suicide Squad as Joker, he sent a live rat to his co-star Margot Robbie.
Dern’s mentorship came at a good time, too, especially if Butler is vying for a second chance at the Oscars race. Natalie Portman, who starred in Aronofsky’s Black Swan, described method acting as a “luxury women can’t afford”.
While Portman trained as a ballerina for the role that bagged her the Lead Actress Academy Award, she later told the Wall Street Journal: “I’ve gotten very into roles, but I think it’s honestly a luxury that women can’t afford. I don’t think that children or partners would be very understanding of, you know, me making everyone call me ‘Jackie Kennedy’ all the time.”
Dern and Butler don’t appear on screen together in Caught Stealing, but at least the only thing Butler let into his real life while shooting was these conversations with Dern, like Hank would with his mother. As the two would end their phone calls: “Go Giants!”
‘Caught Stealing’ is out now in Australian cinemas.
Related:
Austin Butler’s best film and TV shows, ranked
Every Darren Aronofsky film, ranked: from ‘Black Swan’ to ‘The Whale’
