The Austin Butler Effect

They say dress for the job you want. For Austin Butler, that’s Hollywood’s leading man. As a defining face of modern Tinseltown (and with a newly announced role opposite Michael B. Jordan in Miami Vice ‘85 already sending the internet into a tailspin), Butler has quietly cemented himself as this generation’s patron saint of effortless cool. The cheekbones, the vintage white tees, the perpetually quiffed hair: all canon at this point. Now, Butler steps back into his role as the face of Yves Saint Laurent Beauty’s MYSLF franchise for the launch of MYSLF Eau de Toilette Intense, a darker, warmer, more sensual evolution of the original scent.

The campaign, titled Dancing with MYSLF, was filmed in Mexico City under the direction of Romain Gavras, a filmmaker Butler tells me he’d been wanting to collaborate with “for a long time.” Together, they flipped the traditional luxury-fragrance formula on its head. “He had this idea of playing with the idea of a dramatic campaign and having more fun,” Butler says. Captured against the sprawling backdrop of CDMX, Butler spends the campaign dancing solo across rooftops to the apt tune of “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol.

“There were times where they’d throw [choreography] ideas at me,” Butler says of working with acclaimed movement director Damien Jalet, “and other times where I was like, ‘I’m just gonna play now.’” You heard it here first: Butler really was doing all that dancing himself — something he credits, in part, to the years of movement work he did while filming Elvis.

I catch up with the Oscar-nominated actor in the velvet-lined auditorium of El Rey Theatre, tucked quietly away from the hum of Wilshire Boulevard and glowing softly under old stage lights. His mood is characteristically calm, his demeanor warm and slightly self-effacing. Between anecdotes of fixing his sleep schedule and his admiration for the golden era of cinema, he speaks with the same thoughtful softness that’s made him such a magnetic screen presence. What Butler keeps returning to throughout our conversation, though, isn’t performance so much as feeling.

“I remember feeling as a shy kid that I was holding a lot inside,” he says. “Acting allowed me the opportunity to explore emotions more freely.”

Butler’s latest parlay as fragrance ambassador and campaign star feels less like celebrity-brand matchmaking and more like an extension of the way he already works. Long before MYSLF Intense entered the picture, Butler had already been using scent as an emotional shortcut in his acting process. He recounts the preparation for a live theater play years ago during which he wore the same essential oil to daily rehearsals in hopes of subconsciously tethering himself to the character’s emotional state. To his surprise (and eventual reliance on the ritual), it worked.

“Our sense of smell bypasses the conscious mind,” he explains. “You smell something and suddenly it reminds you of heartbreak, or love, or childhood.”

It’s maybe the most revealing thing about Butler: beneath the hyper-curated internet mythology of him (read: the TikTok haircut tutorials and endless discourse around his old-Hollywood aura), there’s still a softness to him that feels almost disarmingly earnest. When I tell him he’s become one of Pinterest’s most pinned men, he genuinely looks stunned. “Are you serious?” he laughs.

That online fascination isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Between blockbuster franchises, increasingly viral press tours, and the looming arrival of a Miami Vice reprise, Butler’s year ahead is shaping up to be another exercise in peak leading-man ascension. Still, his own fashion philosophy remains refreshingly unfussy.

He cites eternal cool-guy references like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Alain Delon, and Marlon Brando as inspirations, though he seems mildly horrified to learn younger generations don’t always recognize the names. “I couldn’t even comprehend that,” he says. His uniform, however, remains decidedly less cinematic than fans might expect. “Jeans and a T-shirt,” Butler shrugs. “If you have one great piece, you don’t need much else.”

That apparently includes the impossible pursuit of the perfect white vintage tee, the ins-and-outs of which Butler passionately describes like a man on a lifelong spiritual quest. “Most of the perfect ones are old,” he says seriously, explaining that modern tees are often “too dense” and lose the easy softness he likes.

As with most things shrouded in glitz and glamor, there’s a tendency to layer meaning onto everything around Butler. Beyond the blockbuster roles, the oft-imitated style, and even the unhurried way he moves through a room, the actor pulls things back down to earth when given the space. As we wrap up our time together in the theater’s hushed back rows, the conversation drifting toward its final stretch, I seek to get the best last word possible without overstepping the moment. So what does a film star actually want from a fragrance? Is it aura? Is it identity? He doesn’t overthink it: “I just want it to smell good.”