00:00For me, it was finding all the internal life of him and who he is and what makes him the way that he is
00:07and what he's actually thinking, even though he's not saying much.
00:11Austin Butler's new film, The Bike Riders, is inspired by the Danny Lyon photo book of the same name
00:16that documented the lives of a motorcycle club outside Chicago in the 1960s.
00:21Stars Butler, Jodie Comer, and Norman Reedus, as well as writer and director Jeff Nichols,
00:26sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk all about the movie.
00:30What was your prior experience with motorcycles before doing this movie?
00:34Mine was bare minimum. I think I'd been on the back of one once,
00:37and it was an old one that was probably very faulty and shouldn't have been on the road.
00:42I grew up, my dad rode motorcycles, my grandfather rode motorcycles, so I'd been on them.
00:50You know, I'd ridden on the back of my dad's when I was a little kid, and then at about 15,
00:54then he said, I'm going to teach you how to ride a motorcycle, and so I went out there and learned.
00:59But I'd never been on an old bike before, and it's very different.
01:03And so that was the big learning curve for me, was just getting used to all the different personalities of each old bike.
01:11Yeah, that was fun.
01:12You're the man in charge. I'm Sonny.
01:16You're a known motorcycle enthusiast.
01:19So did Jeff come to you or how did you get involved in this movie?
01:22So I was doing Daryl Dixon in Paris. I was filming. I went to Cannes.
01:26I sat at a dinner with Jeff. He goes, you know, I'm directing a film called The Bike Riders.
01:30And I was like, the Danny Lyons photo book? And he goes, wow, you know that?
01:33And I said, yeah, I have a few prints at home. I have a signed Danny book.
01:38Then he sent me the script. He told me who was in it.
01:41And I was like, Jeff, you got a lot of good looking guys in this movie.
01:44Can I try something else and just go in that direction? And he was like, yeah, go for it.
01:49Reedus plays Funny Sonny, a bike rider from California who travels to Illinois,
01:53where Butler's character, Benny, is the newest member of a motorcycle club made up of local outsiders.
01:59Comer portrays Kathy, a strong-willed woman inextricably drawn to Benny.
02:03So what are we doing here? Just shooting the breeze?
02:10I guess.
02:12Both Comer and Butler opened up about taking on their roles.
02:15I heard you listened to the recordings that the interviews for the book are based on to really get her accent down.
02:21Can you talk to me about the process and the challenges of it?
02:24Yeah. Well, I mean, when I initially I met Jeff on a Zoom and I'd read the script
02:28and we were just kind of talking about the material and what I felt.
02:32And then at the very end of the call, like as we were getting off, he was like,
02:36you know, I have like 30 minutes of audio of her. And I was like, why?
02:39Why is this not in my inbox? Like, can you like send me this right now?
02:42So he did. And I was like, oh, OK.
02:44I work very closely with a dialect coach, Victoria, who's incredible.
02:47And it was just about like really kind of, you know,
02:51get into grips with the material and trying to make it feel as authentic as as possible.
02:56Benny has this really underlying rage that we see come out in really dramatic ways sometimes.
03:01Where do you think that comes from?
03:03And did you do any sort of character work on his backstory,
03:06either on the real person or did you fill in those gaps?
03:09Yeah, there was a lot that I had to fill in for him.
03:12I think it's a lot to do with his own relationship with his father.
03:17And there being a lot in his in his family life,
03:21you know, that he's very young when he when he joins the club and and to have that type of rage there.
03:29So I I worked a lot on on that trying to figure out, you know, what his childhood was like.
03:35For Butler, the bike riders follows his performance in Elvis,
03:38which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA trophies, as well as an Oscar nomination.
03:43THR recently named the actor one of the top 10 young movie stars taking Hollywood by storm,
03:48with one agency source saying, quote, everyone wants him to be the lead of everything right now.
03:52As a director who's had him lead a movie, why do you think that is?
03:55I think it's because he's a movie star and they don't grow on trees.
03:59And the truth is, it's not just because he's good looking,
04:03but it's because he's got a lot going on.
04:06There's a lot of depth to this young man and we are seeing the beginning of a movie star.
04:12The filmmaker also opened up about directing Emmy and BAFTA winner Comer.
04:16Jodi's one of the greatest actors I've ever worked with.
04:19The amount of work that she put into this character is really unbelievable.
04:23But the reason I cast her was because the first time I talked to her,
04:27she had read the script and the way that she talked about Kathy was the way that I felt about Kathy.
04:32She loved her. She admired her.
04:34She was confused and confounded by her at times.
04:39All things that I felt.
04:41And I knew that she would hold that relationship to that character very delicately.
04:45The Bike Riders rides into theaters on June 21st.
04:49For more on the film, head to THR.com.
04:51For The Hollywood Reporter News, I'm Tiffany Taylor.
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