The 2023 Academy Awards this weekend feature some highly competitive categories, perhaps none more so than that of best actor, where Austin Butler and his star-making turn as Elvis Presley go up against Brendan Fraser, Colin Farrell, Paul Mescal and Bill Nighy.

They hype around Butler’s performance has sustained itself since Baz Luhrmann’s dazzling biopic released last June and the 31-year-old has already scooped a Golden Globe and Bafta for his turn as the king of rock ‘n’ roll.

Besides Butler, the one other person who knows the most about all the hard work that went into that role is his movement coach, Polly Bennett, whom he brought as his plus one to the Baftas and paid public tribute to during his acceptance speech.

In recent years, movement director and choreographer Bennett has become Hollywood’s go-to woman for actors taking on the challenge of playing real-life musical icons in big films.

She helped Rami Malek to Oscar glory for his turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, coached Naomi Ackie for her recent performance as Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody and is already working with Kingsley Ben-Adir on the Bob Marley biopic in production.

‘Honestly, it still surprises me every time people ask me what I do and I say this, because I get to wear Lycra every day and I don’t work in an office – and every job is different, which is really brilliant, and is why I’m still doing it,’ Bennett tells Metro.co.uk.

She’s moved from coaching a model to avoid falling into a swimming pool while eating chocolate on a shoot to the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and theatre – including the Royal Shakespeare Company. Film and TV then came calling with credits such as Netflix’s The Crown, Pieces of a Woman and Nolly.

However, the ‘most surreal’ moment of her already-impressive career was getting the phone call from Baz Luhrmann about Elvis.

‘I think he was on a ferry in New York, and I was standing on the high street in Edinburgh because I was up there at the Fringe. This is what is so amazing with movement work – I can go from fringe productions to being on a Hollywood film set.

‘Edinburgh is also the place where I went to university, so there was something really full circle about standing on South Bridge speaking to Baz Luhrmann, outside a charity shop where they had an Elvis Presley white suit in the window!’

However, Bennett knows the value of her work and is far more involved with her actors’ processes than simply helping them walk from point A to point B in character. This is one of the reasons they are so keen to sing her praises, which is recognition appreciated by the coach.

Austin Butler is up for best actor at the Oscars after over a year of solid work on his performance as Elvis Presley with movement coach Polly Bennett (Picture: Warner Bros/Moviestore/Shutterstock)

‘I don’t want to be a famous person, I’m not in this to be known, but I’m lucky to have worked with some really gorgeous actors who understand that what I am doing as a movement coach doesn’t stop at movement. It’s not [that] I only take care of movement, I’m taking care of – or being part of the conversation about – their psychology, why they’re doing the thing that they’re doing, how they feel about the work that they’re doing as actors,’ she explains. 

‘I’m with them on set cheering them on, being annoyed with them when they’re annoyed. Movement is everything you think it is – and then it’s more of it. So, I do really appreciate being acknowledged for it because in my field, there’s no choreography awards. We don’t always get invited to premieres, we’re not on the list, even though the work that we’ve done has been alongside the number ones on the call sheets and sits very closely next to the director’s work.’ 

She praises her acting clients for understanding the ‘collaborative nature of what movement people and choreographers bring to a process’.

‘If we didn’t have them shouting about it then you probably wouldn’t ever know that we existed,’ she adds as she mentions her hope that the industry will one day give more recognition to roles like hers – ‘the people underneath the surface that are powering everything behind the scenes’. 

Bennett is an accomplished movement director and choreographer with credits including I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Crown (Picture: Helen Murray)

The coach recalls Rami Malek being ‘terrified’ of taking on the role of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody – but he went on to win an Academy Award (Picture: 20th Century Fox/Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock)

When Malek won the Oscar for his acclaimed performance as Freddie Mercury, he presented Bennett with her own ‘fake little Oscar’ as a memento of her being a major part of his successful performance.

Now, she has another best actor nominee on her CV in the form of Butler, with whom she worked for almost a year in preparation before the first scene of the film was even shot.

Once he had clinched the role, Butler requested Bennett and the pair started working together over Zoom before she flew over to New York to meet him, where they walked from Luhrmann’s office in Brooklyn all the way across the city ‘just talking and sort of trying to understand each other’s languages’.

There wasn’t really a shortcut because the world’s watching and it’s Elvis Presley and people really care about him!

Out in Australia in pre-production they spent around five months working on Butler’s transformation into Elvis Presley – and then two days away from filming, Butler’s co-star Tom Hanks was struck down with Covid.

‘We were in that day – me, Tom, Austin, Baz – we were all in a rehearsal together and I was playing Tom Hanks’s ‘nurse’ and wheeling him around in a wheelchair in the showroom and then I got a phone call that evening saying, “You’ve been in close contact with Tom, you’ve got to go into quarantine.”

‘I was like, “Dammit! I was being his nurse, I was being helpful!” and then we went into two weeks of quarantine, and nobody knew what Covid was then – but equally, without Covid, we may not have done as much work as we did.’

Elvis director Baz Luhrmann, Bennett and Butler at the Warner Bros Bafta afterparty following the actor’s award-winning success (Picture: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Warner Bros.)

That work included everything from rehearsing with music and singing coaching to studying karate; it was all ‘dictated by what we felt the script needed us to learn’, according to Bennett.

The movement coach also worked with Olivia DeJonge, who played Elvis’ wife Priscilla Presley, as well as the ‘Memphis Mafia’ surrounding the star and his famous crowds of adoring fans. In Bennett’s book, it’s all connected, and she was grateful that Luhrmann was receptive to that.

In the film, the energy, excitement, and adoration from the crowd is palpable onscreen, particularly when the singer unleashes his moves at his first Hayride gig.

‘The feeling of responding to Elvis on stage isn’t a generic whoop and cheer. It’s a guttural kind of sexual awakening,’ comments Bennett, who even did deep research into the psychology behind screaming so she could coach the young female extras.

Bennett is aware of how much attention Butler’s so-called ‘Elvis voice’ has received from fans convinced he’s forgotten how to talk in his natural tone. What’s her take on the furore and how much did she incorporate his voice work into their movement practice together?

Some fans have obsessed over Butler still having his ‘Elvis voice’, months after production wrapped (Picture: Rich Polk/NBC via Getty Images)

‘They can’t exist without the other thing and Elvis was a singer, so the biggest part of his persona was his voice. So it’s unsurprising to me that there’s been so much press about Austin’s voice – but he’s lived in that space for a really long time.

‘I love people, comparing him when he was 16 to where he is now. I mean, my voice has changed since last week! He’s got a bit of it still, but it’s also because of the deepening of his own understanding of his instrument as an actor.

‘The film is tracing Elvis from when he’s 19 until his death in his 40s, so naturally his voice, his body, all changes. Everything lives inside – our head isn’t just carried around by our body all the time, it’s carrying our voice around [too],’ she points out.

The pair would often physicalise how he was singing, with Bennett using the example of Butler swinging his arm during the If I Can Dream performance for Presley’s ‘68 Comeback Special on television.

Giving a peek into their rehearsal process together, Butler explains that her first job was to ‘understand Austin’s brain [and] what images and ideas made him remember what to do’.

Butler did a lot more than simply try to ‘replicate’ Presley, pictured here in 1962 (Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

‘A lot of the time I was finding entertaining, funny turns of phrase. It’s been well documented that Rami and I had ‘worms’ and ‘spaghetti down the back’ and things like this to help him.’

With Butler it was animal references and being extremely specific with how different parts of his body moved.

‘So how Elvis walks on stage [in] the 70s, it’s not as simple as going, ‘He walks like a dah-de-dah…’ He was playing crocodile eyes, lion legs, dinosaur heart. He was playing three different things, but if those three things are imaginatively activated in his head, it means that he portrays a very nuanced physical state.’

Their biggest challenge together was working out the Milton Berle Show Hound Dog scene, which involved syncopated feet, twisting and improvisation as Presley stunned America with his live performance on TV in June 1956.

‘Elvis hadn’t planned any of that performance at all because it was the first time he performed on stage without a guitar, so he went kind of AWOL which is why it was such a famous and scandalous performance. We did a lot of swing dancing and tap dancing and anything to get his weight low because Austin’s quite a tall man, and Elvis sits quite low in his body.’

As Bennett sums up their method together: ‘It was images and giving a plethora of physical experiences that we could draw from to create the person rather than trying to replicate what we see.’

Although the world would be watching their work, Bennett also made sure she could combat the pressure of Presley’s myth for both herself and Butler.

‘The quest was every time it became, “Oh my god, it’s Elvis,” to go, “Oh no, it’s a person living at this time doing this thing around these people, seeing these things.” It was to take it back to the human at the core of it, and that comes back to my big question of why.’

Bennett points out the influence that African American culture had on a young Presley, growing up in a predominantly Black neighbourhood, enjoying African American music, dancing and fashion, and wearing make-up as a youngster.

‘All of these things help us remember that he was just a person looking for his own identity rather than the Elvis that we see as a kind of beacon that we all have to aspire to. And absolutely, it was terrifying, because there’s a lot of people that care about this man and there’s a reason why he is so impersonated and acknowledged and revered! But we have to remember we’re making a film and not an impersonation, so we have to look at it from an actor’s perspective.’

The Hayride performance by Presley is a highlight of the film, and shows his power to memerise the crowd (Picture: Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Bennett made sure to banish thoughts of Presley’s myth and think of him as simply a human, to help her and Butler cope with the pressure of knowing the world would be watching (Picture: Helen Murray)

This leads onto the biggest misconception about Bennett’s role and how the remit of actors giving performances as real, well-known people is not just creating a carbon copy of them – the work goes far beyond that.

‘There are images and there are ways that people do things that we try and recreate, [but] it isn’t as simple as going, “He does this with his hand, you do that with your hand,” because you’re working with an actor who’s got to do things to psychologically get to the same place as that person was, or their own interpretation of what might be going on before and after this moment that we see on stage. 

‘I think the misconception is that it’s just clicks and it’s counts and it’s doing things the same. I believe that hopefully what I’ve got across is that everything that I’m doing is psychosomatic. It’s about your brain, it’s about your feelings, it’s about how people carry experience in their body.’ 

Although Bennett could easily be seen as making a career niche for herself as the movement coach to hire for actor transformations in big-budget music biopics, she insists there’s still a lot more she’s doing besides the high-profile work, with choreography and theatre work ‘topping it up’.

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However, it’s a challenge she obviously still relishes, hence her work with Ben-Adir on Marley.

‘I think I’ve got quite good at speaking actor now,’ she says in understated fashion, ‘so I enjoy these deep dives into one person.’

Whether Butler wins or loses at Sunday’s ceremony, it’s clear both his and Bennett’s legacy have already been cemented in cinema.

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She coached Rami Malek to an Academy Award with his turn as Freddie Mercury – will Austin Butler be next?