Matt Smith sports quite the extreme look in the new dark comedy thriller Caught Stealing. On an opposite end of the spectrum from his besuited performance as The Doctor, his character Russ in the movie is personally doing his part to keep punk alive – regularly appearing in a studded leather jacket and rocking a flame colored mohawk. The latter is definitely the best part of the whole aesthetic, but as we recently learned from the actor, committing to it required a little extra push from director Darren Aronofsky.
As captured in the video above, CinemaBlend's Hannah Saulic sat down with Matt Smith and Regina King during the recent Los Angeles press day for Caught Stealing, and it was during a discussion about the mohawk that Smith admitted having some doubts about cutting his hair. It evidently took a bit of extra convincing from the director of The Whale for him to work up the courage and trim his locks. He explained,
My hair when I did this was quite long, and I was quite nervous about cutting [it] off actually. Darren [Aronofsky] had to really push me forward. I had a wonderful hair designer called Jon Carter, who sort of constructed this piece to go in the middle of my hair, goes round the outside, and it's a sort of amalgamation of two things. Hats off to Jon and his creative energies.
If you've seen footage from Caught Stealing, you know that the mohawk is a work of art. The coloration is rad, and it's a perfect choice to automatically tell the audience what the character is all about.
In the film, adapted/based on the novel by Charlie Huston, Matt Smith's Russ is very much the catalyst of the story. He is the neighbor of Austin Butler's Hank Thompson – a former baseball prospect who makes ends meet as a bartender – and when he has to go out of town for a family emergency, he asks Hank to watch after his cat. Our protagonist agrees without totally realizing what he is signing up for, as his simple relationship gets him accidentally caught up in a major conflict in the crime world involving the police (Regina King), a dangerous Brighton Beach club owner (Bad Bunny) Russian mobsters (Nikita Kukushkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov), and a couple of Hassidic gangers (Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio).
Also starring Zoë Kravitz, Griffin Dunne, and Carol Kane, Caught Stealing is now just a few days away from arriving in theaters – set to be released this Friday, August 29. This is just the first story from our interviews with Darren Aronofsky and the movie's cast, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more of our coverage.
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