“I played music, I danced around, and I ate Chinese food in there,” he shared. “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.”
Austin Butler is taking method acting to a whole new level.
The Oscar-nominated actor revealed that while filming his upcoming thriller Caught Stealing, he actually spent the night in the East Village apartment set where his character Hank lives.
“For one night, I had the whole apartment to myself,” Butler told Variety. “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.”
Butler explained the unusual sleepover helped him fully immerse himself in the role.
“It made it feel like it wasn’t a set anymore,” he said. “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.”
Unlike some of his more transformative roles, like Evlis, which saw Butler master Elvis Presley’s iconic voice, or bulking up as Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two, the 34-year-old actor admitted Caught Stealing forced him to play closer to himself.
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“It scared me,” he confessed. “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 said he still worked on embodying Hank, an ex-baseball player turned bartender who falls into dangerous territory.
“He needed to have the physicality of somebody who was an elite athlete, but who was no longer in peak physical shape,” he explained. “I wanted to have a certain thickness. So I worked out, but I also drank a lot of beer.”
Director Darren Aronofsky, who adapted the film from a graphic novel, said Butler sometimes went a little too deep into character.
“Austin goes really deep,” Aronofsky shared. “In fact, I often asked him to work a little less hard and to relax a little bit because I wanted a certain looseness.”
Aronofsky added that Caught Stealing is meant to feel like a throwback.
“I wanted to make a film about someone people can relate to,” he said. “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.”
Butler admitted that Hank’s flaws weren’t always easy to embrace.
“Sometimes I’d go, ‘Man, I want to like Hank more,'” Butler said. “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.”
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Set in the late ’90s, the story follows Hank as a simple favor — looking after a neighbor’s cat — spirals into a war with cops, the Russian mob and Hasidic hitmen.
“There’s a lot of miscommunication involved in our story,” Aronofsky explained. “And that’s hard if you have it take place at a time when everyone has a cell phone and is so deeply online.”
The director added that the nostalgic backdrop will be part of the fun for audiences.
“There was something really fun about the ’90s,” Aronofsky said. “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.”
Caught Stealing hits theaters August 29.
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