Austin Butler and Vanessa Hudgens may have a little less conversation following their 2020 breakup, but the exes continue to pay tribute to their past together.
In September 2022 — two years after Us Weekly confirmed the pair had split — Hudgens called her nine-year-long relationship with Butler “life-changing.”
“The public only sees so much,” Hudgens told Nylon at the time, referring to her romances with Butler and Zac Efron. (Hudgens and Efron dated from 2006 to 2010.) “I’ve also been through two very long life-changing relationships, and no one really knows what happened except for me. When I write my memoir, it’ll be amazing.” (Hudgens moved on with baseball player Cole Tucker, whom she married in December 2023.)
Butler, who has been dating Kaia Gerber since December 2021, revealed in a January 2023 interview for The Hollywood Reporter that Hudgens inspired him to take on his Oscar-nominated role as Elvis Presley, though he only referred to her as his “friend.”
He later praised Hudgens for her help in getting him cast in 2022’s Elvis while clarifying her as the unnamed “friend” he mentioned.
“We’d been together for so long, and she had this sort of clairvoyant moment and so I really — I owe her a lot for believing in me,” the actor told the Los Angeles Times in January 2023.
Keep scrolling for everything Hudgens and Butler have said about each other post-split: