Austin Butler starring in Caught Stealing

Austin Butler is set to star in 'Caught Stealing'.

The 32-year-old actor will team up with 'Black Swan' filmmaker Darren Aronofsky for the Sony Pictures crime thriller that is based on the book of the same name by Charlie Huston.

Darren told Deadline: "I am excited to be teaming up with my old friends at Sony Pictures to bring Charlie’s adrenaline-soaked roller coaster ride to life. I can’t wait to start working with Austin and my family of New York City (NYC) filmmakers."

The story centres on former baseball player Hank Thompson as he is unknowingly plunged into a battle for survival in the downtown criminal underworld of 1990s New York City.

Huston is adapting the screenplay with Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures producing.

Sanford Panitch, President of Sony Pictures' Motion Picture Group, said: "Darren is one of the most brilliant audiovisual storytellers in the world, and adapting these wonderful books by Charlie Huston for Austin to star was too exciting an opportunity to not be a part of."

Butler recently appeared in the blockbuster 'Dune: Part Two' as the antagonist Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen but explained that he didn't go as deeply into the part as he did when he starred in the title role in the 'Elvis' biopic.

He told the Los Angeles Times newspaper: "I've definitely in the past, with 'Elvis', explored living within that world for three years and that being the only thing that I think about day and night. With Feyd, I knew that that would be unhealthy for my family and friends."

He continued: "So I made a conscious decision to have a boundary. It allowed for more freedom between action and cut because I knew I was going to protect everybody else outside of the context of what we were doing.

"That's not to say that it doesn't bleed into your life. But I knew that I wasn't going to do anything dangerous outside of that boundary, and in a way that allowed me to go deeper."