Austin Butler Finally Thanks Ex Vanessa Hudgens for Encouraging Him to Play Elvis

Looks like Elvis star Austin Butler remembers Vanessa Hudgens‘s name after all.

In case you haven’t been following along, Austin and Vanessa have been making the headlines together again despite having broken up three years ago. During The Hollywood Reporter‘s Actor Roundtable, Austin very conveniently decided not to name the “friend” that first encouraged him to seek out the role of Elvis Presley. 

“The month before I heard that Baz [Luhrmann] was making the movie, I was going to look at Christmas lights with a friend,” Austin recounted at the time. “There was an Elvis Christmas song on the radio and I was singing along, and my friend looked over at me and goes, ‘You’ve got to play Elvis.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s such a long shot.'”

Of course, many knew from the get-go Vanessa was the “friend” Austin was referring to. After all, Vanessa had already told the very same anecdote, almost word for word, while appearing on Live with Kelly and Ryan back in 2019, when they were still dating. (The truth is hard to hide when your “friend” is arguably more famous than you are.)

But it seems as if all Austin Butler needed was a good ol’ jog of the memory (and some light public shaming) to credit his ex-girlfriend of nine years.

In a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, Austin was reminded of the Christmas anecdote once more, and this time took the chance to clarify that the “friend” in question was his “partner at the time” — Vanessa Hudgens. 

“We’d been together for so long and she had this sort of clairvoyant moment and so I really, I owe her a lot for believing in me,” Austin said. He became an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actor because of his portrayal of Elvis, so we are definitely going to have to agree on that last part.