Matt Smith is punk

For many celebrities being in public is a game of camouflage. As they walk the streets, they don sunglasses, hoods, baggy outfits — disguises designed to retain as much privacy as they can hold onto. But if you happened to be in New York in the autumn of 2024, you might have seen one celebrity completely on show to the world — Matt Smith, sporting a foot-high mohawk dyed in red, orange and yellow. “What’s interesting is that it sort of allows you to walk around and go more unnoticed in a way, because people are less inclined to approach you somehow,” Smith says on our Zoom call. As he bounces between stories, he remembers it did draw attention from a different crowd though. “I’d have my full mohawk — we’d be in the Lower East Side or the East Village or wherever — and dogs would bark at me, consistently. And in America they ain’t got rules on dogs. There’s some big, gnarly motherfuckers out there.”

Smith’s hair wasn’t a result of an ill-advised trip to the barber, but his upcoming role in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing where he plays Russ, an archetypal punk. Complete with studded leather jackets, tartan trousers, a pair of Dr Marten’s and a bobblehead of a zombie Margaret Thatcher attached to the dashboard of his car, Russ finds himself solidly embroiled in the underbelly of New York’s crime scene. “There was just something I quite liked about him,” Smith smiles wryly. As he prepared for his transformation into Russ, Smith trawled New York’s punk shops with the film’s production team and read a history of the movement — but there was one instruction that really shifted his thinking. “One of Darren [Aronofsky]’s notes was ‘I give you permission to be a punk’, and I just thought, wow, what an amazing piece of advice.”

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