Scott Caan, the wisecracker who swore off cop shows and said yes in three seconds

Scott Caan

Photo: PhilipRomano / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 23, 1976 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter and director
Known for	Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Thirteen, Enemy of the State
Awards	Critics Award, CineVegas International Film Festival · TV Guide (shared)

When CBS called about another police procedural, Scott Caan had already decided he was finished with the genre. Ten seasons as a Honolulu detective on CBS and three more on Fox’s Alert: Missing Persons Unit felt like enough. “I just felt like I had done that, and I wanted to do something else,” he told TV Insider. Then he heard who his partner would be. “I think it took me three seconds to go, ‘Yeah, OK, I’m in.'” The partner was LL Cool J, the series is NCIS: New York, and Caan now plays Special Agent Nick Schaeffer on network television every Tuesday. The question now is whether the man who made a living as the quick, cocky mouth beside the leading man can be cast as anything else. Two of this autumn’s roles suggest someone finally thinks so.

The mouth came early, and acting was not the plan. Caan grew up in Los Angeles, the son of James Caan and the actress and former model Sheila Marie Ryan. He was an athlete first, and he has said that his father called the film business goofy and told him to stay away from it. For a while he did. He worked as a roadie for Cypress Hill and House of Pain and, under the name Mad Skillz, formed the hip-hop duo the Whooliganz with a young MC called Mudfoot, later known as the producer The Alchemist. Tommy Boy signed them, put out the single “Put Your Handz Up”, shelved the album Make Way for the W and dropped the pair.

Caan, who was born on August 23, 1976, came to acting through the Playhouse West school in Los Angeles and a run of small independent films. His first role in a major studio picture was Charlie Tweeder, a reckless Texas high-school wide receiver in Varsity Blues (1999). Studio work followed: Boiler Room, Ready to Rumble, the car-theft remake Gone in 60 Seconds, where he played Tumbler, and American Outlaws, in which he was the outlaw Cole Younger.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Ocean’s Eleven (2001) gave him Turk Malloy, half of the squabbling Malloy brothers alongside Casey Affleck, a role he repeated in both sequels through 2007. He expected the set to be an ordeal. “I was positive that, working with all these gigantic movie stars, someone was going to be a jerk, and it was the opposite,” he told The A.V. Club in 2023. In a cast built around George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Turk was the comic relief who talked too much, and it fixed the template for the next two decades.

In the same years Caan was trying to become a filmmaker. He wrote, directed and starred in Dallas 362 (2003), a story of two friends collecting small debts for a crime boss with Shawn Hatosy and Jeff Goldblum; it won the Critics Award at the CineVegas festival. On that shoot the cinematographer Phil Parmet taught him about lenses and light, and Caan kept shooting: in 2009 he published a 256-page book, Scott Caan Photographs, Vol. 1. His second feature as writer-director, The Dog Problem, with Giovanni Ribisi, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006 and went to DVD the following year. He also wrote and starred in Mercy (2009), directed by Patrick Hoelck, and cast his father, James Caan, opposite him.

Television changed the scale. From 2009 to 2011 he played the talent manager Scott Lavin in 19 episodes of Entourage. In September 2010 CBS launched its Hawaii Five-0 remake with Caan as Detective Danny “Danno” Williams, partner to Alex O’Loughlin’s Steve McGarrett. The show ran ten seasons, until April 2020, and earned him a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor in 2011. In May 2012 Danny crossed over into NCIS: Los Angeles and shared scenes with LL Cool J’s Sam Hanna, fourteen years before the two were paired for real.

The trouble with the Caan persona is that he keeps choosing it. Given the pen, he has written himself the same register the studios hired him for: the debt collector of Dallas 362, and in One Day as a Lion (2023), which he wrote and executive produced for the director John Swab, Jackie Powers, a would-be hitman, with Frank Grillo and J.K. Simmons in the cast. The reception of his own projects has stayed modest: The Dog Problem drew a 63 percent approval rating from eight critics on Rotten Tomatoes, One Day as a Lion 64 percent from 22, and MCM’s review called it an awkwardly funny misfire. The man who says he wanted “something else” rarely wrote it for himself. When the change finally came, it came in someone else’s script.

That script is NCIS: New York, which CBS announced in April and premiered on October 6, 2026. Nick Schaeffer grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a family “of cops and fire”, and he is the partner who persuades LL Cool J’s Sam Hanna, back in his home city, to stay; Jennifer Beals plays their boss, Robyn Wells. TheWrap’s critic arrived expecting another variation of the wisecracker Caan has carried from the Ocean’s films through Entourage, Hawaii Five-0 and Fox’s Alert: Missing Persons Unit, the Philadelphia police drama he led opposite Dania Ramirez until Fox canceled it in June 2025 after three seasons. Instead, the review called Schaeffer “one of the most mature characters Caan has had the chance to play”.

The second role plays with his image from the other side. In The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher for Netflix, Brad Pitt’s stuntman returns in 1977 as a fixer for Hollywood, and Caan is Charlie Peters, a TV megastar known, in Netflix’s description, for doing his own stunts. Elizabeth Debicki plays his agent, Karen Crosby, and Carla Gugino his wife, Toni. Fincher has cast the actor who spent ten years as a network cop as the network star who needs Cliff Booth’s help, in the sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Caan holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. His daughter with his partner, Kacy Byxbee, was born in 2014. James Caan, the father who had warned him off the business and then acted beside him, died in July 2022.

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth opens in IMAX theaters for a two-week run on November 25 and reaches Netflix on December 23, while NCIS: New York airs on CBS on Tuesday nights. At 50, Caan has a lead role in network television and a supporting part in a Fincher film at the same time. Both are asking him to be the grown-up in the room.

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Tags: actors, David Fincher, Ocean's Eleven, Scott Caan, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Hawaii Five-0

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