Assembling a Heat 2 cast was never going to be easy. Director Michael Mann’s original film is a modern crime classic—a modern classic, period—anchored by two icons, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who were sharing the screen for the first time ever, and has influenced countless other movies about the inner lives of professional lawbreakers. And while Mann and Meg Gardiner’s part-sequel, part-prequel 2022 novel Heat 2 reads like a deluxe movie treatment custom-designed for adaptation, its story shuttles between the late ‘80s, the immediate aftermath of the original in the ‘90s, and the early 2000s, and features younger and older versions of De Niro, Pacino and Val Kilmer’s Heat characters.
Months ago, two of the best actors alive—Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale—confirmed they’d be part of the Heat 2 cast, if not the specific parts they’d be playing. As recently as June, some outlets were reporting that the question of who’s playing who in Heat 2 remained unsettled, with DiCaprio torn between playing a young Neil McCauley (De Niro’s disciplined master thief in the original) or Chris Shiherlis (Neil’s bank-robbing associate and a timeline-crossing co-protagonist of Heat 2, formerly played by Val Kilmer.) But heading into the July 4 holiday weekend, we got confirmation (via “four individuals close to the production” who spoke to The Wrap) that DiCaprio and Bale were either locked in—or this close to locked in—for their respective roles. The Wrap’s sources say DiCaprio is playing Shiherlis opposite Bale as police detective Vincent Hanna, played in the original by Pacino.
The Wrap also reports that Adam Driver is in negotiations to play primary antagonist Otis Wardell, who’ll span the 1988 and 2000 timelines and serves as the raping, murdering, sloppy, rampaging scumbag ying to Neil McCauley’s dialed-in yang. Stephen Graham, of The Irishman and Adolescence, is in talks to take over for De Niro as Neil, and “other A-list names” are reportedly “circling,” including several actresses eyeing the role of Sharlene, Chris Shiherlis’ wife, played in the original by Ashley Judd.
Needless to say, we’re watching this one closely; for now, let’s review what else we know and don’t know about the original Heat, the novel, and the forthcoming Heat 2 movie, which (if what Mann told an interviewer back in December is still accurate) starts shooting in August of this year.
How did the original Heat come to be?
In 1979, Michael Mann recruited two real-life Chicago police detectives—Dennis Farina and Farina’s onetime burglary-unit partner, Charlie Adamson—to serve as consultants on Thief, his debut feature film, released the following year. He also cast Adamson and Farina in small roles in the movie. While working on Thief, Adamson told Mann the story of Neil McCauley, a professional thief he’d killed in a gunfight back in 1964. Adamson had spent months pursuing McCauley and his crew. At one point McCauley had walked away from a burglary job after sensing (correctly) that Adamson and the Chicago cops were watching him; later, Adamson and McCauley met for coffee at a diner.
Adamson went on to co-create the TV series Crime Story, which Mann produced; meanwhile, Mann wrote a script based on Adamson’s pursuit of McCauley. The details were straight from Adamson’s experience; the story was about a detective finding his soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in a thief, another character who approaches his work with the same singular discipline and seriousness of purpose, at the expense of every other aspect of his broken life. Mann filmed this story twice—first as L.A. Takedown, a failed TV-series pilot that aired on NBC as a TV movie in 1989, and then, in 1995, as Heat, a feature film starring Al Pacino as the detective Vincent Hanna and Robert DeNiro as McCauley.