Originally appeared on E! Online
Austin Butler recently experienced a medical nightmare.
The “Elvis” actor shared that while filming 2023’s “The Bikeriders,” he was jolted awake with a terrible migraine on a flight and lost his vision.
According to Butler, he went blind for several minutes, but told Men’s Health in their September/October issue that he willed his sight back and it slowly returned. The 31-year-old — who also showed off his killer abs for the magazine — didn’t actually think any of it, returning to work the next day and assuming the incident was because of sleep deprivation.
But it wasn’t just his eyesight that was waning, as Butler also shared that when he wrapped filming on the Oscar-nominated “Elvis,” he woke up with intense, appendicitis-like pain and had to be hospitalized.
And as if the hospitalization and the blindness weren’t scary enough, the “Masters of Air” alum also developed a sudden and terrible foot pain while on the press tour for “Dune: Part Two.” As he explained, he actually walked with his toes curled for eight months to avoid extra discomfort. The culprit? A piece of glass, which Butler shared was about the size of a grain of rice.
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Luckily, Butler has learned that putting less pressure on himself to focus on his craft has helped reduce the health scares. And he was able to do that with a little help from Laura Dern.
“It was like the whole room just quieted, and we connected on a soul level,” he told the outlet about meeting her for the first time. “We felt like kindred spirits.”
The “Jurassic Park” actress — who he said resembled his mother Lori Butler, who died from cancer in 2014 — taught Butler that darker roles don’t need to have such an effect on the rest of his life.
“She’s helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side,” he shared, “and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesized, and metabolized. It can be therapeutic, in a way.”
And putting it in practice has been life changing for Butler — who recently split from Kaia Gerber — because he feels he can enjoy his time away from set without feeling like it’ll ruin his performance.
As he explained, “You don’t have to destroy the light.”
Austin Butler is finally explaining that viral video of himself dancing at a Bad Bunny concert — and the story is highly entertaining.
