Austin Butler put everything into his performance as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Elvis, and now he’s up for Best Actor at this year’s Academy Awards. This is his first awards season, and he tells ABC Audio about what he’s enjoyed the most.

“It’s meant a lot to me that I’ve been getting to spend time around actors and different artists that I’ve admired for a long time,” Butler says.

In particular, he says fellow Best Actor nominee Colin Farrell has been “really kind.”

“We’ve been sending each other emails back and forth. And it’s nice to just have people who’ve been, you know, around, chugging away at this business for a long time, that can sort of give you little tips and ideas and things,” Butler says.

Another person Butler says he’d like to sit down and chat with is Best Actress nominee Cate Blanchett; he’d ask her, among other things, “just about life.”

“How she manages to balance the investment that she puts into every role that she takes on with her family life, and how do you balance your personal life with that amount of investment,” Butler continues. “Her preparation process, you know.”

The road to get to the Oscars wasn’t easy. Butler’s had struggles along the way, but he says there’s one thing he’s had to overcome that stands out from them all.

“When my mother passed away,” Butler says. She died in 2014, when Butler was 23 – the same age Elvis Presley was when his mother died.

“It shifted my perspective on a lot of things, and I thought about stopping being an actor for that time,” Butler said. “It felt like a really seismic shift in myself.”

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