Austin Butler went through the physical wringer to make "Caught Stealing" — from bleeding shins to shaved heads Maureen Lee LenkerAugust 30, 2025 at 11:30 PM Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube Austin Butler in 'Caught Stealing' Warning: This article contains spoilers about Caught Stealing.
- - Austin Butler went through the physical wringer to make "Caught Stealing" — from bleeding shins to shaved heads
Maureen Lee LenkerAugust 30, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube
Austin Butler in 'Caught Stealing'
Warning: This article contains spoilers about Caught Stealing.
Austin Butler lost skin and hair to make Caught Stealing come to life.
In Darren Aronofsky's new film, now in theaters, the Oscar nominee plays Hank Thompson, a former baseball player turned bartender who finds himself in the middle of dangerous circumstances after agreeing to watch his neighbor's cat.
Hank is beaten to within an inch of his life, even losing a kidney in the process, before going on the run. In the process, Butler sustained some injuries of his own (though no organs were lost during the making of this movie).
One of his worst, though, didn't even come about in a fight scene. "There's a moment where I jump over a counter, and I hit my shin," he tells Entertainment Weekly. "I cut my shin open, on a metal thing that was on the other side, a metal cabinet or something. This sharp metal piece was there. So, I cut myself open."
Niko Tavernise/Columbia
Austin Butler as Hank Thompson in 'Caught Stealing'
Butler also came home with bruises most days from various fights, chases, and other stunts. "They hung me out of a six-story window in the East Village all day on one arm," he explains. "That bruised me up a bit. You take hits, but it all adds to the feeling of... I look back to playing pretend as a kid, and I used to love to make it feel as real as possible. I would dig holes in the dirt in the backyard just to feel the grit of it. It felt like that here."
In the name of that realism, Butler also shaved his head for the film's conclusion. After his neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), returns and then dies, Hank devises a way out, assuming Russ' identity and shaving his head into Russ' signature mohawk.
Sony
Matt Smith as Russ in 'Caught Stealing'
"It was liberating," Butler says of cutting off his hair. "At first, I felt reticence toward shaving my head into a mohawk because I had no idea what it would look like and my own feelings around what that was going to be. I didn't know what that was going to feel like, but once I shaved it, it was incredibly liberating. When you shave your head for the first time, the physical feeling of the hair follicle is an amazing sensation."
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Butler filmed the scene at the end of the shoot, so he could wait to cut his hair until it was necessary. When they wrapped the film on a beach in Mexico, he took things a step further to celebrate.
"I shaved it all off, and Darren and I jumped in the ocean in Tulum," he says. "It was a symbolic way of ending. We floated in the ocean for a couple of hours."
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
Nikita Kukushkin, Bad Bunny, and Yuri Kolokolnikov in 'Caught Stealing'
Butler shared previously with EW that a headbutt move in that initial beating scene almost broke his ribs.
"I get beaten up by these two Russians in this film," Butler explained. "This one — Nikita, who's a short king — he's got so much power. When he was kicking me, he didn't want to kick me very hard. He felt bad. And I kept telling him, 'Just kick me. Just kick me harder.'"
"So he starts really laying into me and kicking me hard, but then he had this idea of headbutting me in the side, like a little ram or something," he said. "And he did it so hard it almost cracked my rib with his head! I was very impressed."
Caught Stealing is in theaters now.
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