Darren Aronofsky is not a cat person.
“I hate cats,” he said in a video call, showing off his socks emblazoned with the face of his dog. “I’m a dog person.”
But the director had to put aside his biases for his new crime drama, “Caught Stealing,” which features a pivotal feline role. In the gritty Lower East Side of 1990s New York, a cat named Tonic plays Bud, the pet of a British punk, Russ (Matt Smith). Russ asks his neighbor, the local bartender and former baseball star Hank (Austin Butler), to watch Bud while he’s out of town, inadvertently making Hank the target of gangsters across the city who have it out for Russ.
As Hank falls deeper and deeper into the violent mess that Russ created — getting brutally beaten up along the way — Bud remains central to the action. His skeptical gazes punctuate scenes and his presence endears the audience to Hank, who goes out of his way to protect the somewhat ornery creature when the going gets rough. That meant finding a cat to play him with the gravitas for crucial scenes and the mettle for a New York City set.
“I don’t feel like we made it as easy for ourselves as some people would have wanted,” said the screenwriter Charlie Huston, who also wrote the novel on which the movie is based. He added, “I remember a lot of conversations about, ‘Do we have to have the [expletive] cat in this scene?’”
At the outset, Aronofsky said, he was “naïve” about the process of casting Bud.
“I know the producers and the ADs were very, very nervous about it,” he said, referring to the assistant directors. “I think most cat owners would call their cats ‘independent.’ They’re not very notorious for their collaboration skills.”
Initially, the search for Bud was limited to the tristate area, but Aronofsky said he had advocated expanding the search given how important the part was. That’s what led him to Tonic, who is based in Canada with his trainer, Melissa Millett.
Tonic already has quite a résumé. Millett adopted him from a rescue organization when she was looking for a cat to play the undead Church in the 2019 adaptation of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.” Since then he has also appeared in the horror movie “Thanksgiving” (2023).
From the moment she met Tonic, Millett realized he had the composure (and food motivation) to be a star.
“The second he came out of his crate, he looked like he thought he was the king of the world and he was ready for all the chicken,” she said.
Aronofsky and Huston were also immediately impressed when they watched Tonic’s callback audition. The role came down to him and another cat.
“It was just such a no-brainer because the other cat was fine, but Tonic was such a rock star on Day 1 and that was without prep,” Huston said.
It didn’t even matter that Tonic, with his majestic gray-brown fur, wasn’t exactly what Huston had in mind when writing the novel. He had imagined a scrappy street cat. Tonic is “gorgeous,” he said.
But Tonic, who is now about 8, also wouldn’t be fazed by what was required of him. In addition to growing up on a film set, he performs in live shows at county fairs and elsewhere.
“I think fairs is what really prepares him because there will be demolition derbies and concerts and thousands of people and he thrives in that environment,” Millett said. “But this is what New York was going to look like.”
Before getting to set in New York, Millett rehearsed sequences with stand-in actors at her facility outside Toronto, and Tonic did have to learn some new skills. Aronofsky wanted Tonic to gaze directly at the actors rather than at Millet herself, which she called a “complex behavior.” Tonic also had to rub up against Butler’s legs, and while that’s something cats typically do, it wasn’t natural for Tonic.
Millett also trained five of the six doubles for Tonic, including Swivel, a 9-year-old deaf cat who, according to Millett, is the only other cat visible onscreen.
“Tonic’s an animal, he’s a thinker,” Millett said. “Swivel was a sweet little boy that loved to be held.”
Millett ran two training sessions with Butler, teaching him how and when to feed Tonic to get the right actions from him, as well as how to know whether Tonic was enjoying himself.
“One of the conversations was, if you take the cat into the van and I can’t see you, I need to know that the cat’s still having fun,” she said. “Austin is an incredible cat trainer. He was very, very good at being a partner, being a team and leaving space for us with everything that was going on.”
A couple of moments are digitally manipulated, either because they had to use a double for Tonic or because of safety concerns. However, some of the most memorable beats came simply from turning the camera on Tonic.
“As I was shooting the cat, I would just wait until it would do a few different things that I’d be like, ‘Oh, we can probably read into that a performance,’” Aronofsky said. “You bring it into the edit room and you go through it and you actually look for the right emotion that is there.” For instance, Tonic seems to wink when Hank and his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), are having sex.
One moment that impressed both Aronofsky and Huston involved Tonic’s inspecting Butler after his character has just suffered an intense beating.
“I have no idea why Tonic was doing that at the time or if Tonic might have been checking it out,” Aronofsky said. “I kept playing that over and over again when I got those dailies because I was like, ‘Look at this brilliant cat.’”
His only regret? Because Tonic has so much fluff you can’t see his costume.
“He actually has a leather-studded necklace, like a punk necklace, on the whole time, but you don’t see it because of the big mane,” Aronofsky said.
The director remains a dog person, but Tonic impressed him.
“I would work with Tonic in a second again over many human actors,” he said.
The post This Star Has the Moxie and Acting Chops for a Crime Drama. He’s Also a Cat. appeared first on New York Times.
