Dope Thief showrunner Peter Craig has quietly been one of Hollywood’s go-to writers for crime drama the last 15 years.
In 2010, Craig transitioned from a crime novelist to an in-demand screenwriter thanks to his co-writing credit on Ben Affleck’s crime thriller The Town. Craig then showed his versatility by adapting Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay into The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Part 2, before bringing his own crime novel, Blood Father, to the big screen in 2016. Since then, he’s collected a co-writing credit on Bad Boys for Life, as well as story credits on Top Gun: Maverick and Gladiator II. But he’s always returned to his bread and butter in the crime genre, most notably as the co-writer of Matt Reeves’ The Batman.
Based on Dennis Tafoya’s Dope Thief, Craig’s first foray into television premieres Mar. 14 on Apple TV+, and the 8-episode crime drama merges Craig’s primary interests and disciplines as a novelist and screenwriter. The limited series centers on two Philadelphia con men, Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura), who pose as DEA agents in an effort to shake down small-time drug dealers. That all changes when they pick the wrong house in rural Pennsylvania, forcing the two longtime friends to protect each other and their loved ones from threats far and wide.
Craig always wanted to put down roots in the crime genre, but he also doesn’t mind if the industry placed him there after The Town.
“In a way, I’m riffing on The Town again with Dope Thief. There’s an awful lot of callbacks to it that are mostly intentional, but some of them are unintentional,” Craig tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I just know that kind of world really well, and while I probably was put in this genre [by the industry], I’m also really happy to be here.”
Similar to his work inside Reeves’ “The Batman Epic Crime Saga,” Craig’s Dope Thief explores the many different levels of a criminal hierarchy, while also treating some of the perpetrators with a bit more empathy than you might find elsewhere.
“Philosophically, Matt Reeves and I think the same way. We think that, a lot of times, the actors [i.e. perpetrators] in a violent situation are also the victims in a violent situation,” Craig says. “This chain of violence and victimhood just goes on eternally.”
Over the last decade, many limited series have been produced and promoted as such until success compels the network or streamer to keep a good thing going. Recent examples include Shōgun, The White Lotus and Big Little Lies, prompting the limited series to be called “the new pilot.” While Dope Thief has exhausted its source material in the same way that Shōgun did, Craig is only now starting to ponder the idea of a second season.
“I do like that idea. I haven’t [given it any thought], but now that you’ve said that [the limited series in the new pilot], I will. If you think of this as a pilot, that’s perfect,” Craig admits. “I wrote the ending to resolve it, but resolve it so that it could go someplace else a few years later if you want it to.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Craig — who also happens to be the oldest son of Sally Field — begins by discussing his feature work en route to Dope Thief, including the controversial decision to split Mockingjay in half. Then he addresses this particular writer’s theory regarding the lineage of Paul Dano’s Riddler/Edward Nashton in The Batman.
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To set the stage for how you arrived at Dope Thief, you first put points on the board by co-writing The Town. That opportunity has since turned into many more crime dramas. Did you always want to hang your hat in this subgenre?
I really did, actually. I got very comfortable in it really quickly. I started as a novelist who wrote books that were only moderately read, but they were respected crime books that were mostly about con men. I just loved the genre because the stakes are immediately there, and you can do what you want to do with character. I then had a great experience on The Town, and in a way, I’m riffing on The Town again with Dope Thief. There’s an awful lot of callbacks to it that are mostly intentional, but some of them are unintentional. It’s those themes of loyalty when guys are under pressure, codependent relationships between guys that are trauma bonded, and guys that grew up in juvie together. So I just know that kind of world really well, and while I probably was put in this genre [by the industry], I’m also really happy to be here.
I presume The Town landed you the Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I and Part II jobs, before Blood Father became the first time you adapted a book of your own. Was that quite an eye-opening experience after working with other authors’ works for so long?
It was, especially after Suzanne [Collins]. You have to have so much respect for Suzanne’s [Hunger Games] novels; that’s why you’re doing them. They’re so beloved that I was in a situation where Lionsgate was telling me the most tweeted-about sections of her book, saying, “They have to be in there. You have to hit certain scenes. You need to have certain characters.” You still need to do an awful lot of invention, even for the most loyal adaptations, but I had to hit so many marks that were so close together in those movies. I also got so close to Suzanne because she was a producer, and there was so much consulting. I would have to talk to her every time I made even the slightest divergence. So it was a very different process, and it’s a different kind of writing that I came to enjoy. I really loved getting to work with the phenomenal actors that were in those movies, but that was one kind of adaptation.
When we got to my book, we had almost no money at all, and I didn’t care what the author thought because the author was me. I would just freely make fun of him to the crew all the time. I’d be like, “Well, forget the author. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But there were so many problem-solving rewrites I had to do during Blood Father just because it’s tough to make a cheap movie nowadays, particularly in New Mexico. You lose days to frequent dust storms or rain storms. So I loved the freedom of just making a movie and seeing how different it would be from the book. It then changed the way I thought about adaptations. You can get the tone of it right, you can get the sense of it right, you can get the same moral journey of it right, but you can get there any way you need to get there. It’s a different art form.
I spoke to Francis Lawrence recently, and while hindsight is 20/20, he said he regrets having to split Mockingjay into two films. He did note that the decision was made by the studio before he signed on to do them. But has your own opinion evolved over the years?
It’s interesting that he said that. It was a studio decision, and my opinion has evolved a little bit. I think most people would want [Mockingjay] to be one movie, but I’m still really proud of what we did in Part 1, even though it’s odd. I’m not sure that it totally works as a movie, but that was a really hard movie to write. The world doesn’t want to look at how hard your difficulty score was on your gymnastics trick; they don’t really care. They just want you to stick the landing, but the difficulty score on that movie was incredible. We were adapting the setup of a book, and it was the most internal of Suzanne’s three books at the time. It’s the one where Katniss is losing her mind, and she’s in a closet for a lot of the first half just thinking about stuff. The second half of the book is where everything happens.
So I didn’t know how we were going to do it, but I was really proud of the work we did. I just focused on the task at hand. When I look back on it, you could have done a much more traditional movie that would’ve made everybody leave a lot more satisfied, obviously. There was a sense of it being a bit of a cash grab in terms of how they did that [split], particularly because it was in that era where there were so many copies of the movie coming out. There were so many other things that were just trying to capitalize on the YA craze. But at that point, I was very workmanlike, and I just did the best I could with what was in front of me.
The Batman certainly has some of the same DNA as Dope Thief. It seemed like that movie was heavily implying that the Riddler’s (Paul Dano) father was the murdered reporter, Edward Elliot.
(Craig smiles.)
They had similar characteristics, and the Riddler’s first name was also Edward. The differing last names could easily be explained. But the overall idea would be that Falcone likely had a hand in creating both of these orphans, Bruce Wayne and Edward Nashton, as well as their alter egos, Batman and the Riddler. Did I misread the movie, or was that takeaway quite purposeful?
The way that you’re reading it would make some people, including Matt Reeves, very happy. It’s the level of detail that was certainly discussed and thought about, but some of that is going to spoil what I know is continuing forward. There was a glitch on IMDb. It looks like I’m working on the sequel right now, but I’m not. It’s still Matt, and Mattson Tomlin came on [to co-write]. But let’s just say that those ideas you’re bringing up are exactly the level of detail people should be looking at, because it’s a meticulously wrought world that Matt Reeves is building there. He’s incredibly rigorous and incredibly detail oriented, and that was part of the fun of working on The Batman with him.
Secondly, one of the Riddler’s followers is unmasked on a catwalk at the end, and he dishes Batman’s “I’m Vengeance” line back at him. I assumed this was the same guy that Batman beat to a pulp at the start of the film and said that line to, illustrating the cycle of violence. But I’ve heard conflicting takes on that guy’s identity, so who was he exactly?
I like your interpretation better. I think that guy was just a guy. The ordinariness of him was supposed to be about how this violence and feeling had metastasized and spread all over the place. He was supposed to be sort of an Everyman, but your interpretation is right in that they were both Everymen. Philosophically, Matt Reeves and I think the same way. We think that, a lot of times, the actors [i.e. participants] in a violent situation are also the victims in a violent situation. This chain of violence and victimhood just goes on eternally. So even if that reading is not exactly right, it’s spiritually right. It was supposed to be the same kind of guy, and it was the same kind of idea: what you put into the world, you’re going to get right back.
Having your name on Top Gun: Maverick is quite a feat. When a script changes hands that many times over the years, it seems like it’s very rare for the finished product to reach that level of quality. Do you also think Maverick is one of the exceptions?
That was an interesting process because all of us writers got to be friends. A lot of us talked and communicated the whole way through, and it had a consistent spine in Cruise and Joe [Kosinski] and [Christopher] McQuarrie. McQuarrie is listed as the last writer, but that’s really because he was the circulatory system for all of us. So there were interesting things everybody was taking from each other, and Goose’s son was my original pitch to Tom, which he loved. I can’t underestimate how involved Tom is and how much he understands audience expectations and knows exactly how long to linger on something and how fast to move on to the next thing. So there was a whole team of people that were all pulling in exactly the same direction, and that came from how good the leadership was from top to bottom. It was a piece of perfect machinery. Every cog fit into each other perfectly at exactly the right moment, and I think there’s a dozen people that are justified in taking some credit for it.
So why was now the right time to try television after all your feature work?
It just worked out that way. It was a project I really liked, and I was so comfortable in the crime genre. I also felt like I could do so much with these characters that I connected with so quickly. Ridley [Scott] and I had been working on a feature that didn’t go. I worked a little bit on Gladiator II, but David Scarpa did more of Gladiator II than I did. I was almost an outlier. (Laughs.) I was some of the broader strokes in that. But Ridley and I had been working on another movie that was really good, and as happens, sometimes, you lose your financing.
So I had just started working on Dope Thief [around that same time], and I showed Ridley the pilot. He got the dark humor of it, and he was like, “This is great. I want to do this. I want to do TV again.” He’d done Raised by Wolves, and while I think he had a pretty good experience, he wanted to do it again. So once Ridley jumped on, it suddenly looked like we had a show, and I just went at it. I just went towards the daylight, like a plant that grows towards the daylight. And I was lucky enough that I had committed early on to something that I understood really well. So it was partly the opportunity, and it was partly the love at first sight of Ray and Manny.
Did Ridley utilize his 12-camera approach on the premiere? Or did he scale it back?
He did six at one point, and six is still an awful lot. Ridley and I were just joking about it a couple of days ago. When we went back to two cameras, it was really hard to tell the actors, “Oh, you’re going to have to do this more than a couple times now.” That transition was tough because Ridley likes to treat it like theater and get it all in a couple of takes. If an actor asked for another take, they could have it, but Ridley really likes to get it all that way because he’s all about spontaneity. So he never used less than four cameras on this, and I was pretty amazed at his spatial gift of being able to get four into certain scenes and situations. But he did. So it’s fascinating to watch, and while it’s very hard to light, it made me very impressed with Ridley. It also made me very impressed with [DP] Erik Messerschmidt.
Ray and Manny rob drug dealers by posing as DEA Agents, and this is a known practice because drug dealers have no legal recourse. But the inciting incident here is when they rob an entity that happens to have its hooks in everything …
Yeah, it’s robbing somebody that does have that recourse. Eventually, you’re going to hit a shadow economy that’s bigger than what you’ve been planning for all this time. Their con doesn’t work except at the smallest levels. As soon as anybody recognizes you or as soon as anybody’s heard about you, you’re screwed. It’s obviously something that’s taken incredibly seriously by law enforcement because it diminishes their ability to do their jobs, and that is why I added the law enforcement side of it to the [adaptation] process.
At the very beginning, Ray and Manny know that if they do this one or two more times, they’re screwed. They know they’ve burned Philly, and they haven’t really made very much money off of this. So by going outside of their normal bailiwick, they’re able to believe that they can pull it off another time, and that’s the very thing that gets them into this corridor. Truth be told, Pennsylvania has always been this kind of smuggling corridor. Rural Pennsylvania is one of the most interesting places in the history of the United States.
Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura work really well together, which is all the more impressive when you consider that Wagner joined mid-stream. How much rewriting did you have to do on the fly?
Very little. Wagner got it right away, and he ran with it. There’s a huge Brazilian community in Northeast Philly, so I said, “Why not use it? Why do I want to put Wagner in a mold at the last second where he has to speak Spanish again [like in Narcos]? Why don’t I just use [his Brazilian background] to my advantage, and have Manny and his girlfriend Sherry be a mixed race couple?” She speaks Spanish, and he speaks Portuguese, so I knew there’d be some opportunities to have little arguments where they try to pull each other into their different first languages. So the main thing I changed was Manny’s backstory so that Wagner could play the same version of the character, only he’s from Brazil, as opposed to the Dominican Republic. That radiates through into absolutely everything, and it was a small change that allowed Wagner to be Wagner. It allowed him to play to all of his strengths.
But other than that, Wagner played the character exactly as intended, which is incredibly vulnerable. The irony is that we now have Pablo Escobar playing somebody who’s completely destroyed and rolled over by the drug world, and Wagner loved that. He felt like this character is almost defenseless, and I love that he was willing to play it that way. Manny has got this strange, crooked moral apparatus that he’s trying to re-engage with, and it makes less sense the more he tries to justify himself. But what an intelligent actor Wagner is to be able to do everything he did here.
Ray and Manny bicker like Breaking Bad’s Walt and Jesse, but I’d say they’re both closer to Jesse in terms of being in over their heads. Neither is a savant like Walt was. However, like Jesse, they both surprised me along the way with what they’re able to achieve, individually and collectively. Anyway, how do you see their dynamic duo?
I think of it as a tragic love story in a way. That kind of trauma bonding that happens when you go through youth detention together is real love. You bond in the trenches together. You have each other’s backs, and you’ll protect each other forever. So it’s a real connection and a real brotherhood, but you’re always tethered to the trauma. The other person is always reminding you of it, and the other person isn’t really allowing you to escape it and start a new pattern. So it’s classic codependency, and they’re spiraling with each other in this dance the whole time. It’s ironic because Manny really believes that love is the thing that’s going to save him from the morally questionable things he’s done the whole time. And with Ray, it’s sometimes the opposite in a sense. Love is the best thing we feel, but it’s also the thing that can kind of imprison us, sometimes.
There’s a terrifying voice that haunts Ray and Manny throughout the series. Did you know ahead of time whose voice you wanted, or did you collect dozens of voice recordings during casting?
We didn’t know exactly who we were going to cast, but luckily, we found a brilliant actor who’s done a lot throughout his career. When we were shooting, I was actually the one who did the crazy Boston accent on the walkie-talkie, and everybody joked about it. But they actually thought I could sound kind of sinister when I had a cold. I almost always seemed to have a cold when we were filming in Philly. I do right now, too. So we didn’t cast that role until later in the game, and that’s just the way it works, sometimes.
Similarly, Marin Ireland either has no voice or a gravely whisper throughout the show. Was that aspect of the role a tough sell to her or anyone else who went out for it?
It wound up being the opposite for Marin. She is so great at finding what the challenge is and latching onto it. She also has the most incredible eyes. They just leap out. They’ll literally communicate and almost come out of her head. So she wanted to play that role kind of like Holly Hunter in The Piano. She’s somebody who can’t talk and is doing everything with gestures and her eyes.
So she really loved the idea that the whole show is about this character who’s trying to get her voice back and trying to be heard. She’s somebody who’s desperate to get the truth in a story where the entire landscape is about lying. So I’m really happy we got her. She was really diligent about all the modulations of her voice.
In 2025, the limited series is the new pilot, so how much forethought have you given a potential season two?
I love the way you said that. That’s really funny.
It’s true. If now-former limited series, such as Shōgun and Big Little Lies, can get a season two, then why not Dope Thief?
I do like that idea. I haven’t [given it any thought], but now that you’ve said that, I will. If you think of this as a pilot, that’s perfect. I wrote the ending to resolve it, but resolve it so that it could go someplace else a few years later if you want it to. So [the ending] is an interesting punctuation. It’s an ellipsis, for sure, but it’s still an end punctuation.
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The first two episodes of Dope Thief premiere Mar. 14 on Apple TV+.
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