• Austin Butler claims to owe Vanessa Hudgens “a lot.”
• The pair broke up in 2020 after dating since 2011.
• We’d been together for so long and she had this sort of clairvoyant moment”.

The 34-year-old beauty was the one who encouraged the 31-year-old actor to take on the main role of The King in the upcoming biopic “Elvis.” The pair broke up in 2020 after dating since 2011, when the actor was 31.

He told the LA Times: “I was with my partner at the time.[Vanessa], that’s right. 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.”

Just a few days earlier, the former “Zoey 101” star, who is currently dating model Kaia Gerber, alluded to Vanessa as an anonymous “friend” who insisted that he one day had to play the late “Hound Dog” singer even before the movie went into production.

He said: “I was going to look at Christmas lights with a friend. And 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.’ Then my agent called and said, ‘So Baz Luhrmann is making an Elvis film …’ The hairs just stood up on my arms. It made me go, “All right. It’s Everest. I don’t know if I’m good enough. But I’ve got to give it everything.

“I hired a movement coach, a singing coach and a dialect coach, and I just started working like I had the job. I met with Baz after about a month. And we spent five months trying things. And then eventually I had to do a screen test. I was like, Oh, I don’t have the job?’ ”

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