Related Articles
In every young man’s life, there comes a time when he must learn what Pearl Jam’s name means. For Oscar-nominated actor Austin Butler, that time was during a Nineties trivia drinking game with his Caught Stealing co-star Zoë Kravitz.
“It’s jizz, dude,” Kravitz bluntly explains in a new video for Rolling Stone. (Though as the game’s moderator, RS film critic David Fear, points out, legend also has it that “Pearl Jam” was a hallucinogenic, peyote-laced concoction Eddie Vedder’s great-grandmother used to make. Here’s the real story.)
This Pearl Jam/jizz/peyote digression occurs after an opening Nineties trivia question about grunge frontmen. The game itself is inspired by Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming film, Caught Stealing, a crime thriller centered around a burned-out ex-baseball player (Butler) who winds up embroiled in the criminal underworld of Nineties New York City.
In between questions about Nineties cultural touchstones like Friends, Space Jam, Beavis and Butthead, the Spice Girls, and Sir-Mix-A-Lot — during which Kravitz racks up a lot of points and Butler downs a lot of shots — the pair also discusses working on Caught Stealing. They chat about the Nineties artists they listened to on set (Portishead, Massive Attack, Bjök, Radiohead, Alanis Morissette); Butler recalls some role prep he did as a bartender; and both he and Kravitz rave about working with co-star Bad Bunny.
“He surprised me with how funny he was,” Butler says. “He was prepared. He was also game for anything.”
“And he takes risks,” Kravitz adds. “He made some real character choices, which is brave.”
Elsewhere, the two also share some of their most formative New York City memories. Kravitz remembers sneaking out of her high school during lunch to go smoke weed in Central Park, as well as visiting the storied punk shops on St. Marks Place back “when St. Marks was not Pinkberry,” she quips.
And Butler remembers moving to NYC right before Hurricane Sandy and talks about what it was like watching his neighborhood come together while living without power for two weeks after the storm. “Actually feeling the energy of New York and how it comes together around these events, that the community bands together,” he says. “It was beautiful to see people feeding other people. Restaurants had to cook their food because they didn’t have refrigerators that were working. We were having barbecues out on the street, and I felt welcomed into New York at that time.”
