Caught Stealing Ending Explained By Darren Aronofsky & Austin Butler

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Caught Stealing.

The ending of Caught Stealing has been broken down by star Austin Butler and director Darren Aronofsky. The new crime movie stars Butler as Hank Thompson, a former baseball player who finds himself mixed up in the criminal underworld of New York City when he agrees to catsit for his British punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith).

The Caught Stealing ending finds a bedraggled Hank having escaped his predicament with millions of dollars. However, he is the prime suspect in the deaths of his girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz), his boss (Griffin Dunne), a detective (Regina King), and multiple criminals (including Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Bad Bunny).

In his final scene, Hank has shaved his head into a mohawk to imitate Russ and used Russ’ passport to escape to Tulum, where he relaxes on the beach.

Entertainment Weekly recently sat down with Aronofsky and Butler in two separate interviews to discuss the ending of Caught Stealing. Aronofsky said that “both me and Austin are exhausted and at the end of Hank’s journey,” though he said that there is the potential for a sequel should there be “popular demand.”

Austin Butler, who actually shaved his hair into a mohawk for the final scene, called the process “liberating” and revealed that he and Aronofsky found a “symbolic way of ending” the process of shooting the movie, by jumping into the ocean after the project wrapped and he had fully shaved his head. Read Aronofsky and Butler’s full quotes below:

Darren Aronofsky: It’s a sad situation. We wanted to give him a little bit of hope and potential… Both me and Austin are exhausted and at the end of Hank’s journey, but we’ll see what popular demand says.

Austin Butler: It was liberating. 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.
[After the scene was done,] I shaved it all off, and Darren and I jumped in the ocean in Tulum. It was a symbolic way of ending. We floated in the ocean for a couple of hours.

What This Means For Caught Stealing

There is potential for the Darren Aronofsky movie to receive a sequel, because Caught Stealing is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Charlie Huston. Huston, who wrote the screenplay for the movie as well, later penned two sequels starring Hank Thompson, namely 2005’s Six Bad Things and 2006’s A Dangerous Man.

However, it seems like 2025’s Caught Stealing may end up being a standalone. While the movie has earned solid reviews (it has 84% from critics and 86% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s only projected to earn a 4-day domestic debut of $9.5 million, which sees it debuting at No. 3 and falling short of its reported $40 million budget.

Even if the movie does turn a solid profit by the end of its run, which is still within the realm of possibility, Aronofsky’s comment about being “exhausted” and the fact that Butler is committed to many upcoming projects, including A24’s Enemies and a movie adaptation of Don Winslow’s City on Fire, could prevent the sequel from coming to fruition.

Austin Butler as Hank Thompson sitting down exhausted in Caught Stealing

Even if Caught Stealing doesn’t get a sequel, these remarks reveal how committed Aronofsky and Butler both were to bringing Hank’s story to life in a realistic way. This translates well onto the screen, as the movie captures the visceral and overwhelming nature of Hank’s predicament in a way it may not have with a different director and star.