Michael Mann has found his Kelso. According to TheWrap, Ebon Moss-Bachrach will take on the role originated by the late Tom Noonan in 1995's "Heat." Guy Pearce was reportedly in the mix at one point, but Mann ultimately went with Moss-Bachrach.
This is a smart piece of casting. Noonan's Kelso was only in a couple of scenes in the original, but he left a mark, that eerie, soft-spoken information broker who hands McCauley the bank score. Moss-Bachrach has proven that he can do a lot with a glance and a pause. The two Emmys didn't hurt either.
He joins what is shaping up to be a great ensemble:
Leonardo DiCaprio (Chris Shiherlis)
Christian Bale (Vincent Hanna)
Adam Driver (Otis Wardell)
Stephen Graham (Neil McCauley)
Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Kelso)
Jason Clarke
Odessa Young (Charlene)
Maria Cid (Gabi)
Moss-Bachrach is having quite the run. "The Bear" just wrapped its fifth and final season, he's Ben Grimm in Marvel's "The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” He recently shared a Broadway stage with Jon Bernthal in "Dog Day Afternoon," an adaptation of Sidney Lumet's 1975 classic. Going from Lumet to Mann is about as good a one-two punch for a New York actor with crime-movie instincts as you can get.
With Moss-Bachrach locked in as Kelso, if you can believe it, several key roles remain uncast in "Heat 2," and Jason Clarke's part is still a mystery.
From the original film, Mann still needs to fill McCauley's crew members Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore) and Trejo (Danny Trejo), fixer Nate (Jon Voight), and Hanna's detectives Drucker (Mykelti Williamson) and Casals (Wes Studi). On the new side, there's McCauley's girlfriend Elisa, and Ana, who has a romance with Chris in Paraguay. Expect announcements soon.
"Heat 2" serves as both a sequel to the 1995 film and an adaptation of the 2022 novel Mann co-wrote with Meg Gardiner. The book, which spans Los Angeles, South America and Southeast Asia, was a bestseller and reignited interest in the "Heat" universe. Getting it to the screen has been a saga of its own, with the project bouncing from Warner Bros. to a Paramount/Sony co-production arrangement before finally landing at Amazon MGM. Cameras roll in November.
Linklater has been planning a film about the transcendentalists, the "first hippies," a literary movement that included Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.