Cindy Crawford is getting candid about Austin Butler’s Elvis Presley accent.
The supermodel was put in the hot seat on the Wednesday, July 24 episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen in a signature game of “Plead the Fifth.” Host Andy Cohen noted that Crawford’s daughter, model Kaia Gerber, is dating Butler, and asked for her “take on his never-ending Elvis accent.”
“I just thought, ‘That’s Austin to me,’” Crawford, 58, responded. “I didn’t know that he was from Anaheim,” she added, admitting she didn’t realize that Butler, who has taken on something of a Southern drawl since starring in 2022’s Elvis, is originally from California.
Even fellow guest Colman Domingo was surprised to hear about Butler’s roots. “He’s from Anaheim?” asked the Rust actor.
“Yeah, that’s where he grew up,” Crawford responded.
“He spent so long being Elvis that I think it just stuck,” she said. “I’ve never heard him … like, I didn’t know him pre-Elvis. That’s just Austin to me.”
Butler, 32, and Gerber, 22, have been dating since December 2021, after he finished filming the biopic.
Around the time of Elvis’ May 2022 release, Butler’s accent was a hot topic online as he continued to speak in the real-life Elvis’ low register long after completing the movie. Butler said he spent three years embodying the character, hence the affectation.
“It really made me feel self-conscious for a second because I thought, ‘Am I being phony? Is this not my voice?’” Butler said during a February 2023 appearance on The Graham Norton Show. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, I’d have to think consciously to not talk how I am right now.’ But my voice sounds different when I talk to my dog or when I talk to my dad or when I’m here right now.”
Butler’s Elvis voice coach, Irene Bartlett, defended the actor’s lingering accent at the time. “Because of COVID shutdowns, he was working on it all the time, and it’s difficult to switch off something you’ve spent so much focus [and] time on,” she said during a January 2023 interview.
In January, Butler revealed that he hired a dialect coach to help him shake off Elvis’ accent before he began shooting Apple TV+ drama Masters of the Air, noting that production began a week after he finished Elvis.
“I started a week after,” Butler said in an interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “It was almost too fast … I was just trying to remember who I was. I was trying to remember what I liked to do.”
