Esquire First Look: Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, and Mark Ruffalo Make <em>Crime 101</em> Totally Stacked

The title Crime 101 carries double meaning. Anyone who’s ever been in a classroom knows that those numbers denote an introductory course. The basics of a subject. The fundamentals. But in this film it also stands for the 101, the aorta of the West Coast, the main artery in the lacework of high-speed freeways around Los Angeles.

That’s the primary getaway route of Davis, the serial jewel thief played by Chris Hemsworth, a gentleman robber who steals only what insurance can replace and plans carefully so that no one is ever hurt. He even keeps a bottle of water in the trunk for the security guard he locks in there. He’s not exactly Robin Hood; he’s taking from the rich and keeping it for himself. But his murky, painful past as someone who came from nothing makes him a little more sympathetic.

“He’s a good guy in a situation doing bad things,” Hemsworth tells Esquire for this exclusive first look at the film, which debuts in theaters February 13. “There was such a vulnerability to the character that we were trying to explore, in order to have an audience side with him.” Plus, he’s the kind of stickup artist who takes your cell phone so you can’t call the police, then throws it back at the last second so you don’t lose your family photos. He may be a criminal, but he’s also a mensch.

Halle Berry as Sharon Colvin, a high-end insurance broker who underwrites the lifestyles of the rich and unscrupulous.

It’s also because he’s a loner who only wishes he had those kinds of photos, or those kinds of people in his life. “For him to point out, ‘Hey, I know this is important to you’ is probably because he wishes that importance was available to him,” Hemsworth says.

In that way, the film from writer-director Bart Layton has more warmth than most cold-blooded heist thrillers. Crime 101 is a throwback to glossy, high-octane movies of yesteryear like The Thomas Crown Affair and The Getaway, both starring Steve McQueen—who is, unsurprisingly, a hero to Davis. There are also undeniable homages to filmmaker Michael Mann’s iconic L.A. crime stories Thief and Heat. “Obviously, who doesn’t love those movies?” Layton says. “They were grown-up, intelligent, Saturday-night popcorn movies, and I definitely felt like, Wouldn’t it be great to bring something of that back?”

As Crime 101 begins, Davis has been thriving for years in the field of literal highway robbery up and down the coast, but he’s also a kind of ghost, always vanishing without a trace into the bustling corridor of the 101. His crimes are so dispersed and his targets are so diverse that the police don’t even realize they’re related. Mark Ruffalo’s detective, Lieutenant “Lou” Lubesnik, has finally cracked the pattern and is certain it’s the same perp, even though no one has seen the thief’s face. Davis has been careful so far, but he doesn’t realize how close he is to being caught.

Corey Hawkens as Detective Tillman and Mark Ruffalo as Lieutenant “Lou” Lubesnik, LAPD robbery investigators tracking the infamous 101 bandit.

This is the textbook setup for a cat-and-mouse thriller, but Layton (best known for the 2013 con-artist documentary The Imposter) goes a step further with his sprawling adaptation of the brisk short story by The Cartel author Don Winslow. “With his blessing, I went away and wrote a slightly expanded version of his brilliant story,” Layton says. “It had a brilliant superstructure—a great beginning, middle, and end—and was an opportunity to build something that could speak to contemporary ideas about status anxiety and where that can lead you if that becomes one of your primary driving forces.”

“Status anxiety” was a term coined by philosopher Alain de Botton in a 2004 book of the same title. Fairly self-explanatory, it’s about the proverbial need to have it all, as well as the emotional toll of heedless material success at the cost of everything else. Los Angeles has always been a backdrop for noir stories like this because, in a town built on glamour and fantasy, that pressure can lead people to do crazy and dangerous things. Consider that the first lesson of Crime 101.

When is enough enough? Hemsworth’s thief feels as if he’s pretty close. The edges are starting to fray; mistakes are becoming too common. Before he slips up in a way that might be fatal, or land him a lengthy prison sentence, he knows he needs to quit. But … there’s a rich asshole (Tate Donovan) who’s importing a collection of diamonds with dubious provenance that will soon be swapped for millions of dollars in untraceable cash. If Davis can nab both, he’d be set.

“For all the intensity, the ones that had me on the edge of my seat were those very still, quiet moments where the slightest kind of misstep means the whole house comes crumbling down,” Hemsworth says.

That’s where the thief’s path intersects with a kind of guardian angel for the rich and powerful: Sharon Colvin, played by Halle Berry, an insurance broker who has been hired to mitigate the risk for this illicit diamond transfer. The stones are intended as gifts for the bridal party at an ultra-high-society wedding, and her firm has been brought in to do the underwriting. That means assessing the risk, backing up the security, and making sure that everything unfolds according to plan. She has worked closely with Ruffalo’s detective over the years, since proof of mistakes (or malfeasance) can save her company millions in payouts.

Almost everyone in Crime 101 has a hand in someone’s pocket. But her hand has been slapped away a few too many times by her own firm. She’s overdue for her share. “There’s this sort of question of how much of what you’re doing with your life are you doing for you versus the perception of others,” Layton says. “It’s a constant, but it feels like it’s more timely now than ever. In Halle’s character, there’s a sense that she’s done everything right. She’s pursued this career that contained the promise of wealth and status and all the rest of it and then arrives at a place, which I guess some of us do, where you think, Was it all worth it, and is it going to deliver?”

Both Hemsworth’s and Ruffalo’s characters could use her as an ally, but it’s unclear whether her loyalty and sense of honor is really shifting or where it might end up. “I think they all get to a crossroads,” Layton says.

Chris Hemsworth stars as Davis, a notorious jewel thief grappling with painful lessons about who he is and what he has done in Crime 101.

To say more would risk spoiling some twists, but one surprising thing that can be revealed about Crime 101 without ruining anything is that the cast is utterly stacked.

Even the small roles have powerhouse actors behind them, like Jennifer Jason Leigh as Angie, Ruffalo’s estranged wife, who makes the most of only a few minutes of screen time to deliver some withering truths to her oblivious, ramshackle husband. Monica Barbaro (best known for Top Gun: Maverick and for playing Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown) plays a prospective love interest named Maya that Hemsworth is drawn toward even as he keeps her at arm’s length, knowing he can never let her see who he really is—or, at least, what he really does for a living.

There’s a running motif of reflections throughout Crime 101, even if the characters don’t always want to see what’s staring back at them. “That is thematically related to this theme of: What am I really about? What am I really in this for?” Layton says. All of the characters are starting to realize that what they have done so far isn’t working for them.

“They’re kind of united by the same worldview, which is ‘Once I get this, once I get to that, then I can feel safe and I can feel like I have my sense of self-worth and I have my place in the world,’ ” Layton says. “ ‘And then I can start to really live.’ ”

Barry Keoghan as Ormon, a ferocious young thief on a crotch-rocket bike who isn’t afraid to use brutality to get what he wants.

Hemsworth says loneliness was the key to his character, but it’s the common trait among all of them. “What I loved about the script is you have these three intersecting storylines and characters from different worlds, but they’re all feeling this sort of existential crisis, this middle passage in life, this reexamination of self,” Hemsworth says. “And the things like social etiquette, the norms, the expectations, the laws that they’ve all abided by again, they’re wearing thin. The ambiguity of life is far more truthful than the black-or-white.”

The role of Ruffalo’s partner, Detective Tillman, is played by another powerhouse—Corey Hawkins, best known as the sweetheart Benny in In the Heights and the stalwart Macduff, who faced down Denzel Washington’s sinister Shakespearean antihero in The Tragedy of Macbeth. Another filmmaker might have saved on the budget by casting a lesser-known actor in that kind of supporting role, but Layton says he wanted someone who could convey that Ruffalo’s character was in danger of being upstaged and outshone.

Berry’s Sharon also fears that younger, more ambitious colleagues are taking what was once promised to her. “It’s sort of like everyone’s being replaced by the new version,” says Layton.

The rival looming over Hemsworth’s character is Ormon, played by Barry Keoghan, best known for Saltburn and his Oscar-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inisherin. In Crime 101, he is a canary-haired punk on a motorbike whose volatile, smash-and-grab approach is the alarming opposite of the smooth, violence-free way Davis conducts himself.

As Layton adapted Winslow’s story, he tailored Ormon to fit personality traits of Keoghan, who had starred in his 2018 crime drama American Animals, about an art student who arranges the theft of priceless rare books. (Taking without asking is a recurring theme in Layton’s filmography.)

Hemsworth’s Davis makes nice with Halle Berry’s insurance adjuster Sharon in a bid to sneak vital security information from her.

“I wrote it for Barry because he and I have a relationship. We’re very close,” Layton says. “Barry comes from a really tough place in the way that Orman does as well. I wanted you to start off thinking of Ormon as someone who’s supremely unrelatable and aggressive and kind of a proper baddie. Then you see some chink in the armor of a vulnerable kid, someone who’s been exploited. That’s a thing that Barry can do in a way that very few people can: that tough street-kid exterior combined with a deep sadness. Even whilst he’s in the middle of doing a terrible thing, you see some glimmer of … just a child, do you know what I mean?”

The man manipulating both Ormon and Davis is known only as “Money”—a longtime fence played by Nick Nolte, another major star in Crime 101’s constellation of performers. His character has that nickname for obvious reasons. He takes the goods, launders them, and disburses the cash that his menagerie of thieves need in order to keep going.

Reflections are a common theme in Crime 101, seen here with Barry Keoghan’s distorted other self as he plots a betrayal of Hemsworth’s Davis.

“Money” was another element lifted straight out of Winslow’s story, which can be found in the author’s 2020 short-story collection Broken. But in Layton’s own research into the cases of real jewel thieves, he says he turned up real-life examples of individuals like this, who groom troubled and vulnerable kids to perpetrate bigger and more dangerous crimes.

“The thing that you see again and again with the people who are doing the high-end, very big robberies, you see it with the lower end as well,” Layton says. “They have often been in the care system who haven’t really had proper adult role models. Kids start off stealing small-scale stuff—bikes, mopeds, things like that—and they take them to fences, where they build a kind of relationship. The fence will then commission them to go and do something more. That was what we were seeing in the research I did ahead of writing it.”

Nolte’s character knows which buttons to push on Davis, even though Hemsworth’s character is now a veteran. But Ruffalo’s Lieutenant Lou also has insight into the mysterious 101 bandit, derived from studying him so closely for so long. He doesn’t know his name, or where he can be found, but he knows him. His values. The lines he will or won’t cross.

Monica Barbaro’s Maya gets to know Davis (or at least tries) during an awkward date night with the man who can’t tell her anything.

Where that information leads him shouldn’t be spoiled, but obviously their paths are destined to intersect. Movie fans can anticipate another onscreen showdown between the pair after many memorable scenes together over the years in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Hemsworth says their time together as Thor and Hulk actually did influence their relationship as the thief and lawman. “I don’t care what people say; there’s always an overlap with you off-screen and onscreen,” Hemsworth says. “And if you’ve known each other a long time, there’s a familiarity. Once we got on set, there was almost a paternal relationship there, which I have felt with Mark. He was far more experienced when I came into the Marvel space, and certainly he has given me some wonderful advice over the years.”

All Davis wants, after all, is someone who knows him. Even if it’s someone who could end him.