Austin Butler had barely warbled his final note as the King before he moved onto his next blockbuster project, Masters of the Air. Actually, the 32-year-old actor recalls, there was a week between shooting Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (for which Butler earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination) and his flight to England, where filming for the television series about World War II pilots took place. In that time, he managed to get sick. Like, really sick: he was rushed to hospital with a virus. Only after that was he able to hop on a flight to London and quarantine (this was 2021, when there were still COVID protocols). “I was still focusing so much on Elvis that I didn’t even have time to read the book or anything,” he says. “So that two-week period was when I cracked open and read Masters of the Air and started to learn everything I possibly could.”
He rewatched the first two series in this wartime trilogy – also executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks – Band of Brothers and The Pacific, as well as films like Memphis Belle and The Best Years of Our Lives. He swotted up on the historical context of World War II. He ran through standard and emergency procedures in a flight simulator with a pilot. “It was almost like being in a classroom,” Butler says, if a classroom had an engine that could light on fire (the flying scenes were shot using a digital backdrop: despite some convincing depictions, no actors actually had to fly aeroplanes). And then there was bootcamp: marching, push-ups, sit-ups. “It just made me feel like I was actually living that life, and it was a time that unified us all.”
In the series, Butler plays real-life pilot Major Gale “Buck” Cleven, a commander of the 100th Bomb Group, an American air force unit which was stationed in England during World War II and whose daring antics usually led to heavy losses (the unit earned the nickname “the Bloody Hundredth”). The book it is based on, the one Butler read while recuperating, is by Donald L. Miller. Its full title, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, should provide you with a sense of this show’s tone: a sweeping, earnest paean to brave people doing brave things. Dads will love it.
Among its cast are some of Hollywood’s most hopeful hopefuls. Callum Turner plays Butler’s best friend John “Bucky” Egan. Ncuti Gatwa (from Doctor Who) and Barry Keoghan (from just about everything) turn up. Raff Law (Jude’s son) and Sawyer Spielberg (Steven’s son) are present and accounted for. But Butler, who was born in California and made his name in teen TV before his breakthrough role in Elvis, is the star here. He brings a surprising sensitivity to the role, depicting Cleven as a dutiful and pensive leader, responsible for many young men while still being a young man himself. His eyes twinkle on command. When we meet, at a hotel hours before the show’s London premiere, Butler is as compelling as any number of red carpet photos (often taken with his partner, model Kaia Gerber) suggest: Old Hollywood cool, and thankfully no trace of a Marvel work-out regimen.
There will be questions about Butler’s much-discussed accent. A trace of Elvis’ Mississippi drawl lingers, but the actor’s approach to playing another real-life human diverged this time. “It’s different to something like Elvis, where he is one of the most documented men in the world and everybody has their own idea of him,” he says. “The closest that I could get – because he passed away – were these home movies.” Those videos showed Cleven in his 80s telling stories to his family about military life. “I just felt the essence of him,” Butler tells me, “you know, his spirit.”
While filming, Butler lived in London, which he loved: “The sense of community I had out here was deeper than I felt in a long time to be honest. Every Sunday night, I had a group that I played cards with and I would ride my bike throughout London.” Was there as much behind-the-scenes camaraderie between the actors as there was on-screen? Yes, but Butler says he mostly kept to himself, because that’s how Cleven was. “There were a lot of moments where I’d hear laughing and singing and they’re having their revelry, and I would be off, by myself.”
“I was trying to maintain the weight of it. I’m always trying to find those moments in reality, where you’re not breaking the energy that you would have while you’re in the scenes. And so there’s moments of needing to be a leader and pulling people together.”
Though the bond between Turner and Butler’s characters takes up most screen-time, the scenes with Keoghan provide the show an unexpected frisson. Butler says he and the 31-year-old Irish actor are “good friends now”: “He’s unpredictable, you know. He was one of the only actors who didn’t go to the bootcamp, actually. So he marched to the beat of his own drum. He showed up on the very last day eating a Snickers bar, and said, ‘Hey gents, how you doing?’ So that was him: he’s animalistic in a way. I think that is what’s so exciting about watching him. There’s a sense of like, he hasn’t planned anything out, and it’s beautiful to act opposite that.” (Butler has not yet seen Saltburn, in which Keoghan really gets to demonstrate those “animalistic” qualities.)
Leading a show like this – which has a rumoured cost of $250 million – must feel daunting, even for an Oscar nominee with big films on the horizon (up next is a leading role in in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two and Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders). But Butler is just excited that people can finally see the show. And perhaps the actor has already passed the real test: at the Los Angeles premiere, a 102-year-old veteran by the name of Luckadoo who had flown with the 100th gave his verdict. Watching the show brought back memories of those first missions, where the clouds were thick and the cold was overwhelming, Luckadoo told the actor. “He said,” Butler recalls, with a note of justified pride, “that he felt like he was back in that cockpit.”
The first two episodes of ‘Master of the Air’ debut on Apple TV+ January 26. New episodes release weekly
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
