Austin Butler gets gritty
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Austin Butler's requiem, Ryan Gosling and the Emerald City, Paramount Global gets junked, Katy O’Brian on the run and a jinx.
Let’s go!
AUSTIN BUTLER GETS GRITTY
There’s always something polished about Austin Butler.
His lustrous breakout role as Elvis (2022) is the apex of cinematic gaudiness. The film is at its greatest when Butler is on stage gyrating, making the audience swoon and looking oh so cool.
In Dune 2, he plays a sinister shaved-head sociopath (still), which director Denis Villenvue said was:
“Something that would be a cross between a psychotic, sociopath serial killer and Mick Jagger.”
And even in this, there’s a terrifying precision to his movements, magnified by his sleek scalp.
Now Butler, who got started playing the typified but forgettable cool guy in Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers (2016), Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019), and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), is working with Darren Aronofsky.
Aronofsky became synonymous with New York grit after his B&W pulse-pounding debut Pi (1998), ripped into the psyche of a numerologist’s madness. His follow-up, Requiem for a Dream (2000), which paints NYC as a druggy playground, has one of cinema’s bleakest endings.
Now, Aronofsky returns to the streets of New York City with Caught Stealing, his new project starring Butler.
Here’s a snippet of the official synopsis of the book on which the film is based:
Within twenty-four hours Hank [Butler] 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. All because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever assembled in one place.
Aronofsky stated it's Butler's: