EW drops first look at the Black Mass gangster.
NewsJohnny Depp hasn’t played a gangster since he jack rabbited into the part of John Dillinger in Public Enemy. The former pirate of the Caribbean also played a cop playing a gangster in and as Donnie Brasco. Depp’s next foray into gangster territory will be in the upcoming Black Mass, where he plays recently convicted Boston mob boss Whitey Buger.
Entertainment Weekly dropped the first shots of Depp as the brazen crime boss, looking a little like a pissed off Hunter S. Thompson with his favorite rifle.
“He could be charming. He could be ruthless. He was like a cobra—you never knew where he could strike,” Scott Cooper, the Black Mass director, said about Bulger. “A lot of people on set knew Whitey intimately. They got chills at [Depp’s] resemblance. Some of them couldn’t even look at him. It’s easy to be the mustache twirling villain but this performance couldn’t be further from that. He is truly gifted.”
To capture Bulger’s look and attitude Cooper and Depp studied FBI surveillance tapes.
“He murdered him in front of numerous witnesses in broad daylight,” Cooper told EW. “In a word, Whitey was brazen.”
“It’s easy to be the mustache twirling villain but this performance couldn’t be further from that,” Cooper said while describing Depp’s interpretation. “He is truly gifted.”
Bulger ratted out the Mafia to the FBI when they started to step on his toes in his home field of South Boston. He swore that the feds didn’t use him, that he used them. Bulger was sent up the river for two life sentences in November of 2013.
Jack Nicholson played a version of Bulger in the Martin Scorsese gangster picture The Departed.
Black Mass also stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Joel Edgerton, Juno Temple, Corey Stoll, Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, Jesse Plemons and Peter Sarsgaard.
Black Masshits theaters on September 18.
SOURCE: EW
