Austin Butler shares how he used Ryan Gosling's weight gain trick to play Elvis

Over the years, many actors have undergone drastic changes to their body to ensure that they are best placed to perform a particular role.

Mark Wahlberg is one of them, as he ditched his usual gym routine for eating a staggering 7,000 calories a day to play the boxer turned priest Father Stuart in the 2022 film Father Stu.

Rob McElhenney is another example, for It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, where he played the character 'Fat Mac'.

To be best ready for this role, McElhenney's daily diet often involved two Big Macs, Krispy Kreme donuts, plus a lot of wine and ice cream, too.

And Austin Butler is another actor who had a bit of a body transformation for his Oscar-nominated role in Elvis.

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For those unaware, Butler played the King of Rock and Roll in the biopic, a Baz Luhrmann film that was loved by many.

But it wasn't as simple as just stepping in Elvis' shoes for Butler, as he revealed that his agent said that he would need to gain a bit of weight to play the older version of Elvis in the film.

To do this, Butler said in an interview with Variety that he pulled inspiration from Ryan Gosling's weight gaining trick to prepare for a role in 2009 film The Lovely Bones.

Let's not forget, Gosling says he was fired by director Peter Jackson days before production began, who didn't think Gosling's 60-pound weight gain was right for the character.

Anyway, Austin told Variety: "I heard that Ryan Gosling when he was going to do The Lovely Bones, had microwaved Häagen-Dazs [ice cream] and would drink it.

"So I started doing that. I would go get two dozen doughnuts and eat them all.

"I really started to pack on some pounds.

"It’s fun for a week, and then you feel awful about yourself."

However, Butler's plan to put on weight was hampered a bit by the Covid-19 pandemic, when the original intention to shoot the film chronologically had to be abandoned.

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When filming was allowed once more, Austin wore a 'body adjustment suit' for some of the later scenes.

Explaining why his mad diet ended up losing him the role of grieving father Jack Salmon in The Lovely Bones, Gosling told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010: "We had a different idea of how the character should look.

"I really believed he should be 210 pounds.

"We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem.

"It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.

"Then I was fat and unemployed."