New set photos from Miami Vice '85 offer the first look at Michael Irby’s character, and they place him in a police uniform beside Austin Butler and Michael B. Jordan as filming continues in New York City. The images were recently shared on X and show Irby standing between the two leads while they appear to be in conversation.
That positioning is doing a lot of work in a single frame. Jordan is seen in a darker suit on the left, Butler in a lighter-colored suit on the right, and Irby’s greyish suit and badge split the difference in the middle, which makes the police presence hard to miss even before the role is named. He is expected to play Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez, the head of the Metro-Dade Police Department's Organized Crime Bureau, a character from the original series once played by Gregory Sierra.
Miami Vice '85 is set in the mid-1980s and is drawing on the show’s first season, with Butler and Jordan leading the movie as Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. The broader cast includes John Leguizamo, Walton Goggins, Alden Ehrenreich, Camila Morrone, Danny Ramirez, Whitney Peak, André Holland, Edi Gathegi and Andrew Schulz, while Joseph Kosinski is directing from a screenplay by Dan Gilroy. The official synopsis says Crockett and Tubbs go undercover as criminals to infiltrate and dismantle southern Florida’s criminal enterprises, keeping the story rooted on the criminal side even as Irby’s character points it back toward the police.
The photos do not confirm the exact scene being filmed, only that Irby is visually threaded between the two leads in what appears to be a conversation setup. That leaves the image with a useful ambiguity: it clearly establishes where Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez sits in the movie’s power structure, but not whether he is mediating the exchange or simply crossing paths with Crockett and Tubbs. Miami Vice '85 is scheduled to be released on May 19, 2028, so this is likely the first of several public looks at how that balance is being staged.
