There will come a time in many young actors’ lives when they are asked to sing. Perhaps they get cast in a musical. Or a big, anticipated music biopic. And when that time comes, there is one man they go see. They make pilgrimages to his home studio or find him on FaceTime or Zoom. At his instruction, they take deep breaths and they stretch and they mee mee mee mee mee. And when they emerge, they—or at least their voices—are changed.
That man is Eric Vetro, the most sought-after vocal coach in America. Vetro is currently getting Timothée Chalamet primed to play Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown. Before that, he worked with Austin Butler for Elvis and Ryan Gosling for La La Land. It’s not all serious awards bait—if you’ve heard an actor sing onscreen in the past 15 years, chances are they went through Vetro first. Will Ferrell’s gorgeous rendition of Andrea Bocelli’s “Por Ti Volare” at the end of Step Brothers? You can thank Vetro for getting his pipes into Catalina Wine Mixer shape. When John C. Reilly made Walk Hard, the ultimate music biopic parody—well, Vetro was there too. And when he’s not immersed in the acting world, he’s coaching everyone from established pop stars like Ariana Grande and Shawn Mendes to rising talent like Omar Apollo and Dominic Fike.
“Somebody could give you a beautiful laptop—the top of the line, the best one possible. But if you don’t know how to turn it on, it’s completely useless,” Vetro says. “I try to teach them how to use their voice.”
Sixty-seven-year-old Vetro radiates enthusiasm. He has perfect teeth and a beard immaculately trimmed to the micrometer. Mention any of his clients, and he has nothing but immediate zeal: Ryan Gosling (“Very, very thoughtful!”), Will Ferrell (“He is unbelievable!”), John C. Reilly (“John is so musical that what I can tell you is nothing was very challenging!”), Austin Butler (“A very humble, sweet guy who loves being an actor!”), Timothée Chalamet (“One of the most talented people I’ve ever met!”).
What exactly makes Vetro so sought after? He says that, rather than having any sort of trademark method, he’s skilled at divining and deducing exactly what style each client needs from him. He’s also just plain nice: Vetro compares one early mentor of his to J.K. Simmons’s brutal drum teacher character in Whiplash. “I became very supportive and kind and sympathetic to people,” Vetro explains. (When he worked with Whiplash director Damien Chazelle on La La Land, “I brought [my old teacher’s] picture and showed it to him.”)
His home and studio are tucked away in Toluca Lake, a peaceful Los Angeles neighborhood north of the Hollywood Hills. Even over Zoom, it’s evident that every detail is meticulously considered. His driveway is circular and shielded behind shrubs. “So if people get followed by paparazzi or whatever,” he points out, “it’s really private.” Walk down a black-and-white marbled hallway and you reach the studio, which overlooks the pool. Platinum records from his clients line all of the walls, save for his “selfie wall,” which is a floor-to-ceiling collage of selfies of him and all his clients. His dog, Belle, a statuesque former show poodle with painted nails, rests nearby.
One of his multiple pianos is covered with signatures from all his students. Back when Vetro was growing up, in a “not very glamorous” factory town in way upstate New York, he remembers Liberace touring the country with a glass-topped Baldwin, which the pianist had signed himself. “That’s why having everybody sign my piano was so exciting,” Vetro explains. “That piano had one signature—mine has over a hundred.”
The glitz of showbiz was always beckoning. His father, a lawyer, didn’t exactly understand it. “When I would watch movie musicals or The Ed Sullivan Show, I’d say, ‘Oh, I want to work with those people.’ I never really wanted to be them. I just wanted to work with them somehow. And my father would say, ‘What makes you think that anybody’s ever going to want to work with you on anything?’” Vetro remembers. “I played the piano and would say, ‘Someday I’m going to play the piano for these people.’ He’d say, ‘You’re out of your mind.’”
But Vetro distinguished himself early on as a talented piano player and singer and went on to study in New York City. One thing led to another: a musician he was touring with asked him to accompany her to Los Angeles. Bette Midler eventually asked him to work with her on her Vegas residency. “The first year I flew there something like 95 times up and back, up and back, up and back up. So the second year I said to her, ‘What if we tried this thing called Skype?’ She was like, ‘that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of. But then as soon as we tried it a couple times, she actually liked it.”
Now his clients come either via word of mouth or directly from producers for classes that start at $400 an hour. Vetro is indefatigable, usually holding eight sessions every day of the week. Except for Sundays, of course.
“On Sundays,” he says, “I usually only see four people.”
Taylor Zakhar Perez, star of the upcoming movie Red, White & Royal Blue, is waving his head around and enunciating HeeeEEEeeeEEE as Vetro bangs away accompanying notes on the piano. I’m observing one of Zakhar Perez’s weekly lessons with Vetro, meant to get his voice in shape so that he’s prepared for whenever a prized musical role does come along.
“He’s like a fairy godfather,” Zakhar Perez says of Vetro. “He’s kind of like a warm hug every time you’re here and doesn’t make you feel stressed out.”
Zakhar Perez first got connected with Vetro through his friend, the singer Sabrina Carpenter. “I had to chase him down,” Zakhar Perez says. “Eric’s busy back to back, all day every day. Just trying to get into his schedule was tough.”
For many of the high-profile roles he’s currently working on, there’s also a dialect coach in the mix. “A lot of times what I’ll suggest to the actor is go just speak through the lines of the song as if it’s a monologue. Go through it and have the dialect coach work with you on what it would sound like if he was just speaking these lines,” Vetro explains. “Then you and I will start singing through them using what the dialogue coach has taught you, and then I will try to figure out with you, how can we make this work singing.”
But it all comes down to building up the singing voice first. “What I always do with anybody is I first say, ‘before trying to sound like anyone else, let’s really have you understand your voice and have it be as healthy and flexible and limber as it can possibly be,’” Vetro says.
For Austin Butler’s Elvis, Vetro actually met the star when he was 16, through another one of his clients, Butler’s then-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens. They kept in touch over the years before Vetro helped him nail Elvis’s singing voice for his audition. Butler famously has continued to talk like Elvis—whether it was when I interviewed him for GQ or during his Golden Globes acceptance speech.
I asked Vetro what he makes of this. First, he pointed out that Elvis’s production lasted so long because of COVID delays, so Butler was maintaining the voice for nearly three years. “The other thing I would say is his voice was not all that different from Elvis,” Vetro says. “When he was a teenager, he didn’t sound like that. But as he got older, I heard his voice get deeper and deeper as I got to know him when he was in his twenties, and he’s not a loud talker. He is very quiet, talks kind of slow. So he already had an element of Elvis’s voice already.”
Vetro also went from one Elvis to another, helping Jacob Elordi with his depiction of the King in Sofia Coppola‘s upcoming Priscilla Presley biopic, though he says that film will require much less singing.
Now, Vetro is in the midst of getting another A-list young star prepped for a biopic of an iconic musician with a highly distinct accent. Before Vetro jumped into preparing Chalamet to play Bob Dylan (and his costars Benedict Cumberbatch and Monica Barbara to play Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, respectively), Vetro worked with Chalamet on Wonka.
“Timothée has this magical aura around him,” Vetro says. “Almost like he has a light around him. He takes what he does very seriously, but he also has a lot of fun with it. So we have a lot of fun.” The two have been watching performances of songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Masters of War,” and “Blowin’ In the Wind.” (Funnily, as he worked with John C. Reilly on Walk Hard, he technically also helped prepare another Bob Dylan-esque performance.)
“Timothée is very, very open,” Vetro shares. “So with him, I don’t really censor myself at all. I just go with what I’m thinking. We listen to a song, we talk about Bob Dylan. I always know with him, honesty is the best policy. If it comes out of my mouth, well, it must be what that person needed to hear at that moment.”
And does Chalamet stay in Dylan’s voice the whole time? “In and out,” Vetro says. “But it comes in.”
Since Vetro is so close to his students for the entire process, he says there’s never one distinct moment when he realizes that they’ve have nailed the voice exactly. It’s more of chiseling down, step by small step. “Now you’ve captured a little bit more of the tone. Now you’re really getting the spirit of the person,” he says. “Oh, yeah, that’s how they emphasize certain words, or certain melody lines. I’m hearing it, whether it’s every day or a few times a week, in a much more gradual way. They’re never shocking to me, because I’ve heard the whole progression.”
As Vetro continues to speak about how talented his clients are, I find myself wondering exactly how far he could take someone who just straight up can’t sing. Someone, perhaps, like this reporter, who once did a rendition of Macy Gray’s “I Try” at karaoke that was so bad someone asked “what song was that?” when I was done. Can Vetro really make anyone sound good?
Vetro smiles and he tells me a story about a hot actor whom Broadway producers desperately wanted in an upcoming musical. The producers called Vetro and told him that money was no object and he could use as many voice lessons as needed to get this actor primed for the musical. “About 30 minutes into the lesson, I stopped and I said, ‘Look, I’m just going to be honest with you. You’re obviously a very good actor. I really like you and your personality. I would love to do this with you, but I’m going to be honest, there’s no way you can do a Broadway musical. You don’t have a sense of pitch, you don’t have a sense of rhythm. Stick with what you do really well. You’re wasting your time.”
The actor heard Vetro loud and clear and decided to bow out. The next day, Vetro got a call. It was the actor’s girlfriend, whispering into the phone. “She said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’” Vetro shares. “‘I’m a singer, but I couldn’t tell him that, because I’m his girlfriend and sure he would hate me if I told him that. Thank you for being honest.’”