Darren Aronofsky’s last film The Whale took Brendan Fraser all the way from obscurity to a Best Actor win at the Oscars. Could Aronofsky do it again on his next film, with a red-hot young star who has already earned one Oscar nomination?
THR reports Elvis and Dune: Part Two‘s Austin Butler will star in Caught Stealing, a crime thriller based on the new book by Charlie Huston. Aronofsky will direct the film set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the ’90s.
Here’s the book synopsis: It’s three thousand miles from the green fields of glory, where Henry “call me Hank” Thompson once played California baseball, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the tenements are old, the rents are high, and the drunks are dirty. But now Hank is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud, who will surely get him killed. It begins when Hank’s neighbor, Russ, has to leave town in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn’t until two Russians in tracksuits drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn’t know what it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn’t have it. Within twenty-four hours, Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet spot of a guy’s head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor.
Coming up for Butler is Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, alongside Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, and Michael Shannon. That film opens this summer. He’s currently shooting Ari Aster’s next film, a Western titled Eddington.
