&34;It felt like the life was being sucked from my body,&34; Butler says Austin Butler thought he was 'dying' after going temporarily blind before filming Biker

"It felt like the life was being sucked from my body," Butler says

Austin Butler thought he was 'dying' after going temporarily blind before filming Bikeriders

"It felt like the life was being sucked from my body," Butler says

By Mekishana Pierre

Published on August 20, 2025 01:14PM EDT

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Austin Butler on March 11, 2025 in Paris, France. Credit:

Marc Piasecki/WireImage

Austin Butler almost died before he got to film the Chicago motorcycle club-focused drama, *The Bikeriders*.

Well, at least it *felt* like that to the the Golden Globe winner.

In an interview with *Men's Health*, Butler recalled a terrifying incident in which he suffered a bout of temporary blindness while flying to shoot Jeff Nichols' 2023 film. The actor told the outlet that during his flight, he "jolted awake" with a terrible migraine just as the plane was landing.

"It felt like the life was being sucked from my body," Butler said of losing his vision for several minutes." I suddenly felt a euphoric sensation, and I actually genuinely thought I was dying."

The actor told the outlet that he "willed his sight to come back," and after it did he headed to set, writing the incident off as "a side effect of sleep deprivation."

Austin Butler in 'The Bikeriders'.

Courtesy of Focus Features

It's not the first time that Butler has shared a harrowing experience from his time filming the Midwestern drama. During a conversation with Josh Brolin for *Interview Magazine* in October of the film's release, Butler reflected on the joys (and dangers) of playing a motorcycle gang with his costars, which include Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook, and Norman Reedus.

"There's such a trust," Butler said of the ensemble bike-riding scenes. "When we'd be in these groups of 40, riding bikes down a tiny road, and you're thinking, 'If anybody were to crash right now, all of us would go down.' And we're not wearing helmets, riding through cornfields as fast as we can."

"Doesn't seem like the most sensible thing," Brolin commented.

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"I don't know how they insured the film, to be honest," Butler said with a laugh. "And you're riding behind a picture car as well, it's kicking up pebbles in your face, so you're getting hit in the eyes with rocks. It was so visceral."

"Sounds like heaven to me," said Brolin, an avid motorcycle fan who often shows off his collection on Instagram. "I envy you deeply, and I did the minute I heard you were doing it."

The period film, based on photojournalist Danny Lyon's acclaimed 1968 photobook of the same name, tells the story of the rise of a fictional Midwestern motorcycle club called the Vandals. Set in the 1960s, the movie follows a core group of original members across the years as they watch the club grow and evolve in both positive and negative ways.

In an exclusive featurette shared by * *ahead of the film's release, Nichols shared that Butler had a major impact on everyone working on the movie. "Austin Butler, just on sight, starts to change the way people behave," he said. "The air changes. The temperature changes."

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Comer, who played Butler's onscreen wife, Kathy, admitted with a laugh that "everyone who meets him falls in love with him as soon as he walks in a room." It certainly helped her film their love-at-first-sight scene where Kathy meets Benny in a bar, which Comer remembered as "nerve-wracking."

"It was busy, and it was live," she told EW in a separate interview*. *"I remember telling Austin at one point, 'God, I'm so nervous.' I felt like I had to speak it out loud in the hopes that it would subside because Kathy is introduced to all of them in that moment and has a showdown with many of them. And I guess I felt the pressure of holding my own within that as she does and just kind of embracing that part of myself in that way."

Jodie Comer as Kathy and Austin Butler as Benny in 'The Bikeriders'.

Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features

Nichols told EW that filming Benny and Kathy's first time meeting was "a special night."

"When Austin sat down, and he turned that chair around, and he smiles at her, it's like I was looking at a movie that was made in the '80s that has been part of pop culture for a really long time," he said. "Now, I'm not saying our film will reach that level of the zeitgeist or anything else, but just for me personally, I was looking at these images going, 'Well, that feels like it's been here forever.' And when he lifts his head up from that pool table, I've been staring at that Danny Lyon photograph for 20 fricking years of that guy with his head down on the pool table, and I get to watch him look up again."

The writer-director doesn't "want to get cheesy about it," but in that moment, he said the movie felt important: "This feels like it's going to, I don't know, stick around."**

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