Austin Butler on how smells help get him into character

“It almost doesn’t feel real, you know, in that way where you’ve had a dream for a long time and then it’s coming to fruition. It feels like a dream.” Austin Butler is talking about the full circle moment of getting ready to work with Darren Aronofsky on the upcoming crime thriller Caught Stealing. It’s been an ambition of his since he first started acting as a kid. “The first director I ever worked with was on a student film, I think I must have been 12 years old, something like that. I asked him who his favourite director was and he said it was Darren Aronofsky. Ever since then, I’ve had this idea in my mind of wanting to work with him one day.”

Aronofsky is just one of many dream collaborators that Butler has had the chance to work with over the last few years, not only through the films he’s been involved with but also through his role as global ambassador for YSL Beauty. The campaign for MYSLF Eau De Parfum, the fragrance he’s been the face of since 2023, saw Butler working with one of his favourite directors, Julia Ducournau.

“One of the things that drew me so much to this [project] was working with Julia Ducournau. I’d seen Titane and Raw and really admired her work,” he says over the phone in that familiar voice which, for all that it’s been discussed and dissected, remains very disarming. “And then getting to work with Benoît Debie, who was our cinematographer, who I was an enormous fan of from when I first saw Enter the Void and those Gaspar Noé films that he works on, and just all of his work. I think he’s absolutely brilliant. So getting to be with them down in Mexico City was very special.” 

Now YSL Beauty is launching a new, more intense, offering in the fragrance franchise: MYSLF Le Parfum. To mark the release, we chatted to Butler about his admiration for the “rebel” Yves Saint Laurent, mixing his parents’ fragrances as a child, and why he finds riding the subway “cleansing”.

Congratulations on the new campaign. Why was YSL Beauty a brand that you wanted to partner with?

Austin Butler: It was really the admiration that I’ve had for a long time for the fashion house. On top of that, learning more about Yves Saint Laurent over the last few years – the man and the rebel that he was, his emphasis on empowering women and blurring the lines of fashion between conventional masculinity and femininity, and just his rebel spirit – I found really inspiring. So when the idea came forth for me to possibly join up with them, it felt like such a privilege to be a small part of his legacy.

What does the fragrance MYSLF smell like to you? How would you describe it?

Austin Butler: What I love is that they’ve taken the Eau de Parfum and intensified it with this new ‘Le Parfum’ – me trying to do my French pronunciation!

I thought you were doing really well.

Austin Butler: Thank you, thank you. So, yes, it’s an intensification. It’s more floral and woody and amber-y, with orange blossom and black pepper and velvety vanilla that is sensual.

Has fragrance always been a part of your self-expression?

Austin Butler: Since I was a kid. I feel that I’ve been sensitive to smell since I was a child, and I would sneak into my parents’ room and mix my father’s cologne with my mom’s perfume. My dad had more of the spicy, woody fragrances and my mom had more of the floral, sweet fragrances. I liked the way that they combined. And it was also like I was carrying my parents with me throughout the day. So yeah, I think that that sort of planted the seed of appreciation for fragrance.

Fragrance, compared to everything else, is able to evoke such strong memories and feelings of people.

Austin Butler: It has a way of bypassing our conscious mind more than any of our other senses.

Since then, how do you think your relationship with fragrance has evolved or changed?

Austin Butler: Well, my taste has evolved. I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to have these experiences around the world where you smell new things and it expands what you like. Plus, even just the process of getting together with the YSL Beauty team and meeting the perfumers – hearing their inspiration for this fragrance, and going to Yves Saint Laurent’s home in Marrakesh and [seeing] the orange trees there... He would have been smelling these orange blossoms in the air and then walking through the streets and smelling the spices and the more woody, peppery scents – I found it very inspiring and educational to learn how that inspired them to make this fragrance.

In your work, you’re such a shapeshifter. With the roles you take on, you really transform into your character. Do you use beauty – and when I say beauty, I mean the hair and make-up, but also fragrance and even vocal work – to unlock and get into the mindset of the character?

Austin Butler: A little bit – everything that you add helps you to suspend disbelief more and more, and to find these keys into the person that you’re aiming to become. And so from the music that you listen to, to the smells that are around you, or vocal work that changes your breathing patterns, or figuring out how the character walks, they’re all elements that help you feel more and more like you understand this person.

Before you start playing a character, would you think about what kind of fragrance would this person wear? Or is it a scent that maybe you’re wearing at the time that then you smell and you associate it with the character and it gets you into that mindset?

Austin Butler: It could be either, it could be a random smell that you smell even a bit unintentionally. The first time that I did that was I did this play in New York called The Iceman Cometh and it was more of an experiment for me – in rehearsal, using this one essential oil that I’d put on and smell it as I was rehearsing these scenes and working on summoning these memories or emotions and then I carry that through the run of the play. And so every night, before I walked out on stage, I put this on and it was kind of amazing how it sparks the imagination and emotional states.

Did your character in Dune have a fragrance?

Austin Butler: Yeah, there’s this woman in London named Ozzy, and I heard these mythical stories about her designing fragrances for Johnny Depp and Jude Law, creating different things for different characters. She’s able to pull together all these smells of things that you wouldn’t expect, like the smell of tar or the smell of asphalt and gunpowder. So for Feyd those were some of the smells that I was working with. And then for each role, you find different things. For Bikeriders, it was more the smell of the gasoline and the oil of the motorcycles and the smell of the cigarettes, that sort of thing. But I want to explore that more and more as I go.

Because you transform so fully into the characters, do you have routines that ground you and bring you back to feeling like yourself? And does scent play a part in that?

Austin Butler: Yeah definitely, I mean it’s as simple as finishing a day on set and going for a walk through the city that you’re living in. When I was doing that play that I was telling you about, my thing was riding the subway home every night in New York. I lived in Brooklyn at that time, and we were up near Times Square, and then I’d take the subway home. And regardless of if you had a great night or you felt that it was your worst show, suddenly it puts everything in perspective when you have humanity washing over you and sort of cleansing you in this wild way, as you ride the subway with people of all different walks of life. So yeah, everything from that, to spending time in nature, or time with friends and family.

You’ve been in the industry for over 15 years now. What do you still love about acting and filmmaking? Do you still have that same passion you did at the beginning?

Austin Butler: Absolutely, I feel so grateful to still be afforded opportunities to work with filmmakers that I’ve always dreamed of working with and actors that I’ve admired for a long time. And I also love that I get to call it my job to follow my curiosity every day and to aim to understand the world through other people’s eyes. It inherently breeds empathy and I feel grateful that that’s a part of that process.

You mentioned in an interview that you were trying to watch a film every day. Have you been keeping up with that?

Austin Butler: I mean, it’s been horrible, I’ve been travelling. I definitely have been watching as many as I can and the nice thing is, when you’re on a plane, you can watch multiple movies, so I kind of can make up for it at those times.

What’s the last one that you loved?

Austin Butler: I went back this last week and I watched some films that I’d already seen. Sometimes if I’m having trouble choosing a movie, I’ll go for an old faithful, so I watched Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I watched Blow Out. I watched The Favourite again.