Austin Butler Loves the Smell of Gasoline, Grease, and Jeremy Allen White
It’s easy to fall in love with Austin Butler. He’s got dashing blue eyes, perfectly quaffed hair, and is the king of direct eye contact. And with two movies out this year—Eddington and Caught Stealing—plus more on the horizon, he clearly has a schedule as intense as his stare.
Caught Stealing, out today, is yet another bullet on his already impressive resumé. In the film, which also stars Zoë Kravitz and is directed by Darren Aronofsky, Butler plays Henry Thompson, a former baseball player who finds himself tangled up in the New York City crime world.
He previously played Elvis in the biopic of the same name, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award; next came The Bikeriders and the cult-favorite Dune: Part Two. Earlier this year, Butler had a role in A24’s Western comedy/thriller Eddington. When we meet, he has just finished filming Enemies, another A24 crime saga, opposite Jeremy Allen White in Chicago. And he somehow also found the time to star in a recent campaign for YSL Beauty’s MYSLF fragrance.
Below, he shares his secrets for surviving night shoots, names his best-smelling co-star, and stresses the importance of loving yourself.
You’re in the fragrance game now. Which character of yours would smell the best? The worst?I remember talking to Priscilla about Elvis wearing cologne. So I think he would probably smell good. Feyd-Rautha from Dune would probably smell like tar and gunpowder. Benny from The Bikeriders…you know, I also like the smell of gasoline. I know it’s probably bad for me to smell it. Grease and gasoline, they each have their thing. Find me just smelling the fumes.
Who has been your best-smelling co-star?Jeremy Allen White and I just did this movie together [the A24 spy thriller Enemies]. He does smell good. I don’t know what he wears, but it’s the combination of a beautiful scent and the smell of fresh cigarettes.
Chicago is a beautiful city. It really has a big-city feeling, but then at the same time, it feels like a small town. I feel jet-lagged right now, because I’m used to staying up all night and sleeping all day for the last month and a half. Your circadian rhythm is all off.
I bought blackout curtains for the windows and had a white noise machine to drown out the sound of the sirens outside. But I found that when I got home and the sun was just rising, my body would go, “Okay, it’s time to wake up.” So then I’d end up wanting to eat and then watch a movie or something. I wouldn’t go to sleep until eight or nine in the morning.
What do you love about YSL Beauty’s Myslf Absolu fragrance?I’m a fan of woody scents, but this also has more subtle floral notes, particularly the orange blossom. I grew up in Orange County, California, with an orange tree in my backyard, so the smell of orange blossoms brings me back. That’s the personal connection for me. The people who designed the scent told me stories of Yves Saint Laurent himself in Morocco, and there are all these orange trees around there, too.
What other scents from your childhood stay with you?The smell of water on the grass and a Slip ’N Slide. It just brings me right back to vivid memories of hot summers growing up, slipping around in the front yard.
In Caught Stealing, you play a former high school baseball player. How much did you know about the sport before that?I was too shy as a kid to actually play team sports. They tried to put me in baseball, and I came home crying. I said, “I don’t want to be around those other kids.” I used to go to Angels games with my parents as a kid. Then I moved to L.A. in my early adolescence, and we had the Dodgers. I have such happy memories of going and getting a Dodger Dog, sitting in the stands with my mom. We were always in the seats that were really far back. I loved that.
I’ve been learning over time. It’s hard being a person [laughs]. Figuring out ways of loving yourself is very important. I try to remain curious and open, and to not be too rigid. I’m curious about other people. So that’s taking this question off of myself, but [I like my] curiosity.
A version of this story appears in the October 2025 issue of ELLE.
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