Nobody could have guessed at the time that the kid who appeared in episodes of Hannah Montana and iCarly before making their feature debut in Aliens in the Attic would emerge as one of their generation's finest actors, but Austin Butler has long since cast off the shackles of adolescent Nickelodeon stardom.

These days, he's a Golden Globe-winning and Academy Award-nominated star who can always be relied on to give everything he has to whatever role he plays, even if he's come dangerously close to flirting with the Jared Leto school of method acting by taking things so seriously he's become the butt of the joke.

He's just about exorcised the ghost of Elvis Presley, and subsequent performances in the likes of Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing, Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two, Ari Aster's Eddington, and Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders have handily set out the aspirations that were first on display when he played a small part in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Butler wants to surround himself with the best auteurs in the business, and he's been doing a stellar job so far. He's still only in his early 30s, but he's shown more than enough range already to indicate that he won't be a flash in the pan, and it looks as though he'll be a fixture of the screen for decades to come.

He's named Mark Rylance, Robert De Niro, and Heath Ledger among his most important inspirations, and an early performance in a Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh opposite two-time Oscar-winning legend and borderline acting deity Denzel Washington was the best and steepest learning curve any performer could hope to get so early in their career.

And yet, no matter how good he is, or continues to get in the years to come, there's one name that Butler knows will always remain out of his league. "James Dean was the actor I obsessed over as a kid," he told Vogue. "I watched Rebel Without a Cause so many times. It seems almost impossible what Dean was doing, the animalistic power that he had."

Dean only had three credited acting performances to his name when he died at the age of 24 in September 1955, but that was still enough to land him two Oscar nominations, inspire an entire generation both on and offscreen, and cast a shadow over the profession that still lingers 70 years later.

There's no shame in Butler admitting that Dean is the unattainable goal that he'll never be able to match, because thespians have felt that way since the '50s. Paul Newman and Marlon Brando are two all-time greats, and they spent their formative years in the business either looking over their shoulder or casting envious glances at the East of Eden and Giant figurehead.

Plenty of actors have been dubbed the second coming of James Dean over the years, and while those are shoes that nobody is going to be able to fill, Butler knows that even if he fulfils all of his wildest dreams and ambitions, he'll still only be the second-best actor in history.