Austin Butler will play Elvis Presley opposite Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker in a bio-pic director Baz Luhrmann will shoot next year in Australia.
A co-star in Quentin Tarantino’s soon-to-open Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Butler won raves appearing opposite Denzel Washington in a 2018 Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh.
Lurhman tells Deadline he chose Butler "through a journey of extensive screen testing and music and performance workshops, I knew unequivocally that I had found someone who could embody the spirit of one of the world’s most iconic musical figures."