Guy Pearce has been cast to star alongside Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton in the new Whitey Bulger biopic, Black Mass.
The cast for the Scott Cooper directed Black Mass continues to impress. Ever since the announcement of the project going forward with Johnny Depp as the famed Boston criminal kingpin from Southie, interest has raised on this gangster drama from the director of Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace.
As according to Variety, Pearce has been cast as the brother of Whitey Bulger, the mobster turned FBI snitch, and finally fugitive. Pearce also joins Joel Edgerton, who has been cast as John Connolly, the childhood friend of Whitey who becomes his FBI handler (and who ultimately tips off Whitey when the feds start closing in).
The movie is set to be produced by Cross Creek Pictures and is to be adapted by screenwriter Mark Mallouk from the 2001 Dick Lehr/Gerald O’Neill bestseller Black Mass: The True Story of An Unholy Alliance Between The FBI and The Irish Mob. The project also put two in the back of the head of Ben Affleck’s planned Whitey Bulger film, which was being written by The Wolf of Wall Street and Boardwalk Empire scribe Terrence Winter with the intention of Matt Damon to star as the infamous gangster. Affleck instead opted to adapt Dennis Lehane’s period gangster drama They Live By Night first and foremost. However, Affleck was able to somewhat adapt Bulger before as a composite character played by Pete Postlethwaite in 2010’s The Town. Still, Bulger was most famously “adapted” in fiction through the maddening visage of Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which featured a more violent conclusion to “Frank Costello’s” relationship with the FBI and other law enforcement.
Black Mass is being produced by Brian Oliver and Tyler Thompson of Cross Creek, John Lesher, and his LeGrisbi banner.
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