Hank finds himself in a classic "wrong man" narrative and takes a beating at every turn. But he's still strong and in decent shape...right down to his derrière.
"The first thing I sent Austin when we decided to do this was photographs of baseball players' butts," says director Darren Aronofsky. Adds Butler with a laugh: "A whole collage of baseball players' butts. It's on my phone somewhere."
Aronofsky explains the reasoning behind his gluteal DMs. "Because that's what they look like," he adds. "All that power comes from their legs. The reality is, we wanted it to be real-world physical stunts. Hollywood has pushed action into hanging off of planes or cars tumbling downstairs, which is all great and enjoyable, but there is something about the physics of a real-world chase scene that was fun to get back to."
Butler says he trained for several months leading up to filming to get in shape to play Hank. "I wanted to get my body physically into a place where we felt that I could have been a baseball player at one point," he explains. "Even if I've let myself go a bit. But just putting on that size."
Caught Stealing, which is adapted from Charlie Huston's 2004 novel of the same name, follows in the tradition of other wrong man narratives such as The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, and After Hours. (That movie's star, Griffin Dunne, also features in Caught Stealing in a fun meta nod to the cinematic genre, and by pure coincidence, his character is also named Paul.)
"A lot of people talked about [director Alfred] Hitchcock when we were setting it up," says Aronofsky. "I've watched a lot of Hitchcock over the years, but I rewatched a bunch.
"It's definitely a genre of the normal guy that goes down into this rabbit hole," the director continues. "It has been hijacked in Hollywood by, like, an undercover normal guy who ends up having kung fu the second it happens. We were not interested in that. We were like looking at Hitchcock and Frantic with Harrison Ford or something. We looked at Jonathan Demme's [Something Wild]. And After Hours, of course. It's what happens when a normal person gets sucked into a vortex?"
