Heat 2 | Leonardo DiCaprio seems uncertain as to which character he’ll play

Leonardo DiCaprio says he and Michael Mann are still working on Heat 2, but they’re still discussing which character he’ll eventually play. Amid a starry cast that is also said to include Christian Bale, Adam Driver and Austin Butler, Leonardo DiCaprio will likely have one of the more pivotal roles in Heat 2. We say ... Heat 2 | Leonardo DiCaprio seems uncertain as to which character he’ll play

Leonardo DiCaprio says he and Michael Mann are still working on Heat 2, but they’re still discussing which character he’ll eventually play.

Amid a starry cast that is also said to include Christian Bale, Adam Driver and Austin Butler, Leonardo DiCaprio will likely have one of the more pivotal roles in Heat 2. We say ‘likely’, because judging by a recent interview he gave to Deadline, he hasn’t quite decided which character he’s going to play yet.

Or maybe he’s just being coy.

Heat 2 is, of course, the sequel to writer-director Michael Mann’s own iconic 1995 thriller, Heat, which originally starred Robert De Niro and the late Val Kilmer as professional thieves and Al Pacino as the LA cop doggedly on their tail. Based on the novel Man co-wrote with Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 ambitiously expands the story’s canvas, exploring what both cops and robbers got up to before and after the 1995 film’s events.

“This is very much its own movie,” DiCaprio said of the upcoming (we hope) adaptation. “We’re still working on it, we’re a ways away from production. It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there. The book is already out there, so there are no big secrets that I’m divulging. It’s set in the future, and the past, from that pivotal moment in what I think is the great crime noir film of my lifetime.”

Interviewer Mike Fleming Jr seems to have intel that DiCaprio will play Chris Shiherlis (once played by Kilmer) or Vincent Hanna (Pacino’s cop character), and he asked the actor which part he’d chosen. All DiCaprio would say when pressed was “We’re in mid-discussion.”

Previous reports suggested that it was Austin Butler who’d play Shiherlis, though at this stage, the whole picture looks rather fuzzy. With the movie’s location and epoch-spanning scope putting the frighteners on Warner Bros due to its potentially huge budget, the whole project was sold on to United Artists (owned by Amazon) in October.

It was once thought that Heat 2 would finally begin shooting this year, but look again at what DiCaprio said above: “We’re a ways away from production.”

It could be some time before Michael Mann finally gets going on his long-in-gestation crime continuation, then. Especially if he and DiCaprio are still deciding on who the latter will play. For what it’s worth, our money’s on Shiherlis.

More on Heat 2 as it comes in.