How Laura Dern saved Austin Butler from himself: “You don’t have to destroy the light”
One movie that came and went without much fanfare at the tail end of this summer, but that more people should see if they can, was Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, a thrilling jump into the New York underworld starring Austin Butler as a former baseball star trying to avoid a bunch of murderous gangsters.
It didn’t pull up any trees at the cinema, possibly because the story involved didn’t catch the imagination of a UK audience. But it’s likely to do better once it hits streaming sites because it is a taut, action packed, just over an hour and a half bit of cinema that features a great central performance from Butler, who is turning into a generational talent.
Of course, he grabbed everyone’s attention with an undeniable turn in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic, not least in that amazing revisiting of the 1968 comeback special song ‘If I Can Dream’, the moment where everyone in the cinema took a collective gasp of breath and realised that Butler was a pretty special actor.
That performance brought him an astonishing number of award wins and nominations, including an Academy Award shout and a Golden Globe win for ‘Best Actor’. In the few years since, Butler has quietly gone about cementing his status in the industry as a leading man with the main role in the Apple TV+ epic war series Masters of the Air and a major part in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Two.
On each job he says he has built up a number of experienced actors that he can turn to for advice and guidance on his ascent to the A-list, one such person being Jurassic Park star Laura Dern, who Butler met at an event and found a kindred spirit with, the more experienced actor reminding him of his late mother who passed away ten years ago.
He says that Dern has helped him with understanding that playing a darker role doesn’t need to take over an actor’s life, explaining to Men’s Health: “She’s helping me more and more to see that you can come out the other side, and maybe bits of you have healed, and synthesised, and metabolised. It can be therapeutic, in a way.”
Butler has also worked on the necessity for rest after a gruelling schedule led him to have an episode of temporary blindness on a flight between jobs on his way to film The Bikeriders with Tom Hardy, starting with what he thought was a migraine but getting progressively worse. He’ll now sleep better and be able to disengage without feeling it will compromise the performance he gives, adding: “You don’t have to destroy the light.”
Fans of Butler, and of the recent Springsteen biopic, Jeremy Allen White will be excited to know that both actors are teaming up for a new A24 movie called Enemies, about a detective going head-to-head with a hitman on the run. Hereditary’s Ari Aster, who directed Butler in this year’s flop Covid comedy drama Eddington, will serve as producer on the movie, which is expected to hit screens in the first half of 2026.
If the plot sounds a little bit like the 1995 Michael Mann classic Heat, then there’s more good news, because Butler is rumoured to be involved in the long-awaited sequel to that movie too.
