Noah Segan, the Rian Johnson actor who became the director of a vanishing New York

In almost every film Rian Johnson has made, Noah Segan walks into the frame, says what he came to say and leaves. He has been a twitchy high-school burnout who knows too much, a hired gun desperate for his boss’s approval, and a state trooper too starstruck by Benoit Blanc to do much policing. Segan has a phrase for that job: a character actor is “a guy who takes the gig and goes and does it.” The film he has just written and directed works the other way. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York never lets John Turturro leave the screen, and his Harry Lehman is an old professional the city no longer pays.

That reversal is the shape of his career right now. Harry lifts a bag from the wrong young man, the heir of a crime family, and has a few hours to give back what he took, which sends him across all five boroughs. Asked what he wants his work to say, Segan gave Sundance a single sentence: “That people are largely decent and trying their best, even if they’re thieves.”

He grew up inside the business. Segan was born on October 5, 1983, in Brooklyn, a fourth-generation New Yorker whose grandfather was the documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein and whose uncle is the musician Rob Stoner. He was working as a small child, with a guest spot on Married… with Children and then years as the voice of Henry, one of the two hosts of Nickelodeon’s animated anthology KaBlam!. “I started working in show business as a kid,” he has said. “It’s literally all I’m qualified to do.”

The door that mattered was Brick, Johnson’s debut, a hardboiled detective story set in a California high school, in which Segan played Dode. In 2005 he rode to Park City crammed into a car with the team, after an ill-advised night at Circus Circus in Las Vegas, and handed out fliers on Main Street. The film won a Special Jury Prize for originality of vision at Sundance, and Johnson kept calling. Segan was the Duke in The Brothers Bloom, Kid Blue in Looper in 2012, an uncredited fireman in the “Ozymandias” episode of Breaking Bad that Johnson directed, and the X-wing pilot Starck in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The mystery films turned the habit into a running joke. In Knives Out he was Trooper Wagner, the local cop unable to hide that he is a fan of the detective he is meant to assist. In Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery he drifted through a billionaire’s island as Derol, a squatter nobody seems to have invited. In Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, in 2025, he poured drinks as Nikolai the bartender, and he also turned up in Poker Face, the series Johnson created for Peacock.

Away from Johnson he built a second reputation in low-budget horror. In Starry Eyes, a 2014 nightmare about a young actress auditioning her way into something occult, he played Danny opposite Alex Essoe. He also appeared in Son Lux’s “You Don’t Know Me” video opposite Tatiana Maslany, a connection that paid off ten years later.

That horror catalogue is also where his record is least comfortable. In Deadgirl, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, Segan played J.T., the teenager who finds a woman chained in the basement of an abandoned asylum and decides to keep her. Variety’s Peter Debruge praised the acting but wrote that the film “takes a disturbing adolescent male fantasy and glosses it up just enough to pass for a legitimate horror movie,” and accusations of misogyny followed it for years. The Johnson label cuts both ways too. Even a glowing review of his new film, in TheWrap, introduced him first as a longtime collaborator of his producer, and the same critic called the film “more than a little rough around the edges,” pointing to “small narrative contrivances” and “an odd concluding cameo.”

His directing began with a segment of the horror anthology Scare Package, which premiered at Sitges in 2019. Then came Blood Relatives, which he wrote, directed and starred in: Francis, a Jewish vampire who has spent a century driving around the American Midwest, is tracked down by his 15-year-old daughter, Jane, played by Victoria Moroles. It premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2022 and went straight to Shudder; 96 percent of the 28 reviews counted by Rotten Tomatoes were positive.

The pickpocket script is older than that debut. About eight years ago, Segan decided to stay home with his infant daughter when his wife went back to work. “We both work in show business, so one of us having a steady gig was enough,” he told The Film Stage. He wrote during her naps and finished as Johnson was gearing up for Knives Out. Johnson read it and floated a company to make it if that film went well. T-Street produced it with MRC, with Johnson as executive producer.

Segan’s first idea for Harry had been the magician Ricky Jay. When Turturro asked to have lunch the next day, Segan flew overnight from Los Angeles to meet him. “There is no John Turturro type,” he told CrimeReads. “There is just John.” Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, friends of Turturro for decades, joined him; Maslany answered a text after years of silence; Jamie Lee Curtis, a friend since Knives Out, took a cameo. They shot on location from April 2025, in the Bronx near where his grandfather grew up and in his own corner of Brooklyn. “We stole shots and paid in cash,” he said. “It was like getting away with a crime.”

The film premiered at the Eccles Theater at Sundance on January 27, 2026, played out of competition at the Berlinale in February, closed Karlovy Vary in July and reached the New York Film Festival in the autumn. Sony Pictures Classics opened it in New York and Los Angeles on October 23, and it holds a Metacritic score of 81. Segan lives in Los Angeles with his wife, whose family is in Philadelphia, and their daughter; the first to hear about Sundance was Rhoda, his 12-year-old dog, and the second was Johnson.

He has not announced what comes next. The nationwide expansion on October 30 will show whether audiences beyond two cities want an analog thief in a cashless New York. Segan likes to cite the code Harry follows, the one old pickpockets kept: the wallet goes in a mailbox, not a trash can, so the owner gets back the ID and the pictures of the kids. It is a small decency, and his film is built entirely on it.

Tags: actors, Rian Johnson, Knives Out, John Turturro, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Noah Segan, Brick