There’s something oddly refreshing about a Hollywood actor who sets a gratitude alarm on his phone every two hours. Not the type of thing you’d expect in a dark theater in Miracle Mile while he’s promoting a new fragrance campaign. Yet there’s Austin Butler, mid-interview, casually explaining that he needs to name three things he’s grateful for at regular intervals throughout the day.
It’s a small detail, but it says something about where his head is at 34 years old and two decades into his acting career. He’s not coasting on momentum. He’s actively working to stay grounded.
When Authenticity Actually Means Something
Speaking with Rolling Stone at the El Rey Theatre, Butler talks about partnership selectivity in a way that doesn’t sound like corporate speak. He’s been offered plenty of deals over the years, he explains, but turns down anything that doesn’t feel like him. Clothing companies that aren’t his style. Campaigns that don’t align with his values. It’s not about being picky for the sake of it; it’s about maintaining a line between the work and the person doing the work.
That philosophy extends to the new MYSLF Eau de Toilette Intense campaign, shot in Mexico City and directed by French filmmaker Romain Gavras. Butler has wanted to work with Gavras for years, ever since watching his film “Our Day Will Come” as a 20-year-old. The director brought an idea that leaned away from the typical brooding fragrance commercial aesthetic and instead paired Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” with actual joy. Dancing on rooftops. Running through rain-soaked streets. The kind of lightness you don’t often see in luxury brand messaging.
“He had this idea for a campaign that leaned away from the drama that one could lean into for a fragrance campaign, and instead have fun with music and play,” Butler tells Rolling Stone. That’s not the quote of someone obligated to be there. That’s someone who actually cared about what was being made.
Music, Nostalgia, and the Piano That Got Away
Somewhere between childhood memories of stealing his dad’s cologne and a two-week sailing trip in the Bahamas, Butler picked up piano and guitar without formal lessons. He learned music theory from a book called “How to Play Piano Overnight” when he was 11 or 12, staying at his grandmother’s house. That weekend, he says, he understood music in a way that let him improvise.
Now, in a rental with just an upright piano, he’s been revisiting Radiohead’s “Like Spinning Plates,” the live version. He played it in his twenties, forgot it, then rediscovered it in London about a year ago. He figures out pieces again, and they sink deeper into your bones the second time around. There’s philosophy in that approach to music. It’s not about mastery. It’s about relationship.
Growing up in Los Angeles meant early access to live music. At 12 or 13, he caught Peaches at The Wiltern. His first Coachella experience involved pitching a tent by the main stage to watch the Black Keys, Bon Iver, and then Radiohead as the sun set. “Just imagine the sun setting, the sun goes down, and Radiohead comes on,” he says. “That was one of the best bits of live music I’ve ever seen.”
When asked if he’d ever release music himself, Butler hedges. He likes to obsess over one thing at a time, and right now that thing is acting. Music is therapy. It’s not a career move.
The Special Window of Time
Here’s where the gratitude alarm makes more sense. Butler remembers auditioning for hundreds of roles as a 15-year-old and booking nothing. Then one line on a TV show. Then another. He knows careers ebb and flow. He knows this particular window of opportunity, where he can collaborate with directors he’s admired for years and work on projects that feel meaningful, won’t last forever.
That knowledge doesn’t seem to stress him out. Instead, it seems to clarify things. He takes time off now more than he used to. Two weeks sailing in the Exumas with friends, including an 83-year-old named Tom who tells him straight and provides perspective. These aren’t the vacations of someone trying to escape. They’re the deliberate pauses of someone trying to remain present in the life he’s actually living.
The gratitude alarm isn’t performative. Neither is turning down deals that don’t feel right, or waiting years to work with a specific director, or learning piano from a weekend book and then forgetting it just so he can discover it again. These are small acts of intentionality in an industry built on distraction.
Whether that approach will sustain him when the opportunities slow down, only time will tell. But right now, in this particular window, he seems to be doing something most people in Hollywood struggle with: remembering why he started in the first place.
