Austin Butler reacted to the backlash he received after he called his ex-girlfriend of nearly nine years, Vanessa Hudgens, just a "friend" during an interview.
“Oh, yeah, I learned a lesson with that one. I felt that I was respecting her privacy in a way and not wanting to bring up a ton of things that would cause her to have to talk," the 32-year-old actor said in a new interview.
"I have so much love and care for her. It was in no way trying to erase anything," he continued, noting that he didn't want to speak about his personal life in the chat. "I value my own privacy so much, I didn’t want to give up anybody else’s privacy."
As OK! previously reported, the Elvis star spoke about his role in the Oscar-nominated film during a 2023 Hollywood Reporter Actors Roundtable conversation.
"The month before I heard that Baz [Luhrmann] was making the movie, I was going to look at Christmas lights with a friend, and there was an Elvis Christmas song on the radio and I was singing along, and my friend looked over at me and goes, 'You've got to play Elvis.' I said, 'Oh, that's such a long shot,'" he recalled.
"A couple of weeks later, I was playing the piano," he added. "I never really sang for any of my friends or anything. That same friend was there and I was playing the piano. She said, 'I'm serious. You gotta figure out how you can get the rights to a script.' Then my agent called and said, 'So Baz Luhrmann is making an Elvis film.'"
Fans then brought up an old interview the High School Musical star, 35, did when she appeared on a 2019 episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan.
"Last December, we were driving along and we were listening to Christmas music, and then an Elvis Presley Christmas song came on," she said at the time. "He had just dyed his hair dark. He's a natural blond, and I was looking at him and he was singing along and I was like, 'Babe, you need to play Elvis.'"
"Then in January, he was sitting at the piano," she added. "And he's playing and he's singing and I'm like, 'I don't know how, but you need to figure out how you can play Elvis. Like, I don't know how we get rights or what we do, but you need to play him.'"
The two, who split in 2020, have both moved on — Butler is now dating Kaia Gerber, while Hudgens recently got married to Cole Tucker.
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In January 2023, Hudgens seemingly reacted to her ex-boyfriend still speaking like Elvis after portraying him in the 2022 biopic flick.
“He went to the Lady Gaga school of Oscar campaign acting,” Instagram user @ryinskott captioned a screenshot of a headline about how Butler nailed the accent.
In response, the brunette beauty wrote, “Crying.”
Esquire spoke to Butler.
