This Star Has the Moxie and Acting Chops for a Crime Drama. He’s Also a Cat.

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.