Austin Butler as Elvis Presley: Meet the woman who taught the Oscar nominee to move like The King

Published

2 years ago

March 7, 2023

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When Elvis star Austin Butler arrived at this year’s BAFTA Awards, it wasn’t his model girlfriend Kaia Gerber who accompanied the actor as his plus-one.

Instead, Butler attended the ceremony with Polly Bennett, the movement coach who spent months working with the star to help him transform into The King.

When the camera panned to his seat after his name was called out as the winner of this year’s best actor award, it was Bennett he was hugging; on stage, she was his first thank you very much: “I could not have done this without you and I love you so much.”

Bennett, a British movement director and choreographer who is based in London, is the go-to woman for transformations when actors need to portray very famous real-life people.

After working on the London 2012 Olympics and later as an assistant choreographer for Steve Coogan and John C Reilly for 2018’s Stan & Ollie, she landed the job as the chief movement coach behind Rami Malek‘s Oscar-winning portrayal of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Taking on the royals for The Crown soon followed, and this year she completed her “musical icon trilogy” with British actress Naomi Ackie’s metamorphosis into Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody.

With millions watching their every move, actors are used to being scrutinised, critiqued and criticised. But playing an icon, knowing your performance is going to be compared with the much-worshipped real thing, is perhaps one of the hardest jobs in the business.

“I think it’s a massive task because people have such an affiliation for Elvis,” Bennett tells Sky News. “People know him, people know the performances, so it didn’t slide past either of us that it was quite a big deal.”

‘Imagine you’ve got a mosquito on the back of your knee…’

Bennett’s planned six months working with Butler for the Baz Luhrmann production, which was filmed in Australia, ended up turning into a year-and-a-half, on and off, in part due to breaks during the pandemic. They worked together for several hours every day.

The Butler she met before their rehearsals started was “a really musical guy” already; he played the piano, had played guitar to a certain level, “and was a sort of closet singer”. The groundwork was there. They practised swing and tap dancing to get the feel of Presley, and recited his lyrics as poetry.

We have met at a dance studio in central London, and Bennett demonstrates her methods for conveying movements to make them real. It’s not simply “shake your hand”, but “reach out to show off your wedding ring” and shake “as if you’re taking off a glove”. For the Elvis leg shake: “I’d like you to imagine you’ve got a little mosquito on the back of your kneecap. So it’s not coming from your hip, it’s coming from your knee.”

This is where it all comes from, she says. “There’s so many ‘isms’ that people think [Elvis] does, and it’s all based in a truth, it’s all based in an understanding of something. But actually, the more footage I watched, the more research I did, the more books I read, the more interviews I saw… actually, it’s not really his hips that are the first thing that move, it’s his feet, it’s his knees.”

No copying allowed

Luhrmann’s Elvis charts the singer from his teenage years until his death at the age of 42, so Butler, now 31, had to learn different Presleys as he aged. “We had to keep him flexible in that sense because the filming schedule was out of sequence. He’d be in the ’50s one day and then the next day he would be in a jumpsuit [in the early ’70s] on stage.”

Bennett also used Presley’s heritage to teach Butler. “His mum used to tap dance and do the shuffles and the bops in their house. That’s what Elvis grew up around – a mum who was quite effervescent, and moved. So rather than just looking at one piece of footage and going, that’s how he moves now, it’s trying to rewind and go, where did he get this from? That’s so much more helpful for an actor than just copying.

“We’re trying to understand the difference between imitation and embodying. And obviously Austin, as much as he tried, isn’t an exact replica of Elvis; his arms are different lengths, his body is a different shape. So you have to try and find the essence of a person rather than try and do everything exact, because everything exact actually doesn’t sit right in Austin’s body.”

‘I made Rami walk up and down Oxford Street with his mic’

Working with Butler was different to Malek, who was not such a natural mover. “We had to do a lot of work of just understanding music, hearing beats in music, hearing accents, being able to hear the half counts… at that point he wasn’t a performer that had ever been on stage himself. So I made Rami walk up and down Oxford Street with his microphone above his head, while he was training, to get him used to the idea of people looking at him, and wanting people to look at him.”

Mercury boxed as a child, she says, which is reflected in the way he performed. “[I said to Rami], what do you see in his stage performances that feels similar to that? And Rami was like, ‘he does the fist raises’. He’s not just doing it because it feels good, he’s doing it because it’s something that he’s worked on his whole life.”

Ackie’s transformation into Houston was just as impressive, says Bennett, despite the film falling a little under the radar in comparison with the other two. They worked on her background as a gospel singer and also the fact she was a tomboy growing up, very different to the glamorous superstar people came to know.

“When she was a kid, she didn’t wear dresses, she was wearing dungarees and hanging out with her brothers, and she was exposed to drugs very early. We spoke a lot about a boy in a dress, as Whitney. So the idea that she was a little boy, and she’d put a dress on, so she’s sort of acting feminine, rather than inherently being what we understand as feminine.”

Will Butler win the Oscar?

With a BAFTA and a Golden Globe already under his rhinestone belt, Butler could well find himself following in Malek’s footsteps and making a winner’s speech on Oscars night, too (it appears to be a two-horse race between him and The Whale actor Brendan Fraser).

Win or lose, Bennett says she is proud of what they have achieved. “I mean, the fact that there’s nobody going, ‘he doesn’t look like Elvis’ or ‘he doesn’t sound like Elvis,” she laughs. “It’s quite nice that we’ve achieved that for the fans, for the family, and for the people involved in telling the story.”

For an actor playing a real person, those behind-the-scenes roles – the hair and make-up artists and vocal trainers, as well as movement coaches – play a huge part in winning those awards.

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Bennett agrees and laughs. “I’m not trying to go, look at me, look at all the amazing things I’ve done. But I do love the idea of people being recognised for the work they do, because it’s not just people out there on their own, watching YouTube late at night, thinking about how to play Elvis Presley.

“It was amazing to go with [Butler] as his guest to the BAFTAs because that’s also him acknowledging that people in my position – choreographers, movement directors – we don’t have awards, we’re not part of that circuit.” She pauses and gives a wry smile. “Which is a shame.”

You can watch the Academy Awards on Sunday 12 March from 11pm exclusively on Sky News and Sky Showcase. Plus, get all the intel from our Oscars special Backstage podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts, from Monday morning

UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

9 mins ago

November 15, 2024

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UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

9 mins ago

November 15, 2024

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Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.

UK

Wes Streeting ‘crossed the line’ by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Published

9 mins ago

November 15, 2024

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Wes Streeting 'crossed the line' by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Wes Streeting “crossed the line” by opposing assisted dying in public and the argument shouldn’t “come down to resources”, a Labour peer has said.

Speaking on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Harriet Harman criticised the health secretary for revealing how he is going to vote on the matter when it comes before parliament later this month.

MPs are being given a free vote, meaning they can side with their conscience and not party lines, so the government is supposed to be staying neutral.

But Mr Streeting has made clear he will vote against legalising assisted dying, citing concerns end-of-life care is not good enough for people to make an informed choice, and that some could feel pressured into the decision to save the NHS money.

He has also ordered a review into the potential costs of changing the law, warning it could come at the expense of other NHS services if implemented.

Baroness Harman said Mr Streeting has “crossed the line in two ways”.

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“He should not have said how he was going to vote, because that breaches neutrality and sends a signal,” she said.

“And secondly… he’s said the problem is that it will cost money to bring in an assisted dying measure, and therefore he will have to cut other services.

“But paradoxically, he also said it would be a slippery slope because people will be forced to bring about their own death in order to save the NHS money. Well, it can’t be doing both things.

“It can’t be both costing the NHS money and saving the NHS money.”

Baroness Harman said the argument “should not come down to resources” as it is a “huge moral issue” affecting “only a tiny number of people”.

She added that people should not mistake Mr Streeting for being “a kind of proxy for Keir Starmer”.

“The government is genuinely neutral and all of those backbenchers, they can vote whichever way they want,” she added.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously expressed support for assisted dying, but it is not clear how he intends to vote on the issue or if he will make his decision public ahead of time.

The cabinet has varying views on the topic, with the likes of Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood siding with Mr Streeting in her opposition but Energy Secretary Ed Miliband being for it.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is being championed by Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater, who wants to give people with six months left to live the choice to end their lives.

Under her proposals, two independent doctors must confirm a patient is eligible for assisted dying and a High Court judge must give their approval.

The bill will also include punishments of up to 14 years in prison for those who break the law, including coercing someone into ending their own life.

MPs will debate and vote on the legislation on 29 November, in what will be the first Commons vote on assisted dying since 2015, when the proposal was defeated.