Austin Butler is known for his intense approach to his roles, from speaking with Elvis Presley’s signature drawl during the entire production of “Elvis” to training with a Navy SEAL to become the fearsome Feyd-Rautha in “Dune: Part Two.” For “Caught Stealing,” an upcoming thriller in which Butler plays Hank, an ex-baseball player turned barkeeper, he decided to sleep on the set that was supposed to be his East Village apartment.
“For one night, I had the whole apartment to myself,” he says. “I played music, I danced around, and I ate Chinese food in there. It made me feel like I really lived there. I slept there all night, and I woke up to the crew coming in while I was in my underwear.”
For Butler, catching some shut-eye in his workplace was an essential part of his process.
“It made it feel like it wasn’t a set anymore,” he says. “There are many things that conspire against you when you’re making a movie. You’ve got the lights and the camera and the set doesn’t have a ceiling, because they’ve got to light it from above. It’s tempting to look around and break the illusion. So the more I can do to trick myself, the more important it is.”
Many of Butler’s prior roles required dramatic transformations, forcing him to don prosthetics or assume different accents. “Caught Stealing,” which opens on Aug. 29, features Butler more or less as he is in life — charming, charismatic and movie-star handsome.
“It scared me,” he admits. “One of the reasons I got into acting in the first place was that I am very shy. Getting to play characters let me put on this other skin and put on this other voice and become this other person. That made me feel free. But playing a character that feels more like myself left me with nowhere to hide and made me feel vulnerable.”
Butler may not wear a pasty white bald cap like he did in “Dune” or sport Elvis’ mutton chops, but he did work to make himself believable as the gone-to-seed Hank, who traded baseball for booze after an injury forced him to give up the sport.
“He needed to have the physicality of somebody who was an elite athlete, but who was no longer in peak physical shape,” he says. “I wanted to have a certain thickness. So I worked out, but I also drank a lot of beer.”
Director Darren Aronofsky pitched Butler on “Caught Stealing,” an adaptation of a popular graphic novel, when the two were on the Oscar circuit in 2022. Aronofsky was there with “The Whale,” which ultimately scored Brendan Fraser an Oscar victory over Butler, who was nominated for “Elvis,” and the two men bonded as they went from one awards ceremony to another. On set, Aronofsky says his biggest note to Butler was to avoid going full Method.
“Austin goes really deep,” Aronofsky says. “In fact, I often asked him to work a little less hard and to relax a little bit because I wanted a certain looseness.”
“Caught Stealing” feels like a throwback to a kind of movie that Hollywood doesn’t make much anymore. And that’s not just because it’s set in the 1990s, a time before comic book films ate the entertainment business. It follows Hank, who agrees to look after his neighbor’s cat, only to find himself engulfed in a fight between the police, the Russian mob and some Hasidic hitmen over a key that unlocks something everyone is desperate to control.
“I wanted to make a film about someone people can relate to,” says Aronofsky. “Hank is a pretty good guy. He’s not hurting anyone. He’s just a small town boy in a big city, and the world kind of crumbles around him. It’s nice to have a hero who doesn’t have a cape and is a normal person.”
But Hank is also struggling with demons. A drunken joyride left him with a bum knee, as well as a guilty conscience. His best friend was a passenger and died after the car Hank was driving swerved off the road. Now, he’s mostly interested in drowning out his demons with alcohol.
“Sometimes I’d go, ‘Man, I want to like Hank more,’” Butler says. “I want him to make better decisions. I almost started to feel the seeds of judgment for my character. And that’s dangerous. That’s something I needed to stay away from. So a lot of my journey was finding his good heart.”
Setting “Caught Stealing” on the precipice of the new millennium had a certain narrative appeal.
“There’s a lot of miscommunication involved in our story,” says Aronofsky. “And that’s hard if you have it take place at a time when everyone has a cell phone and is so deeply online.”
It’s also a simpler era that Aronofsky says people seem desperate to revisit.
“There was something really fun about the ’90s,” Aronofsky says. “The music was amazing, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the only thing people were scared of was Y2K. Our biggest controversy was the president’s extramarital affair. Audiences will hopefully enjoy going back to all that and seeing answering machines and pay phones again.”
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