Depp a master of disguise
MOVIES: Johnny Depp gives his film career a refresh as a balding murderer in Black Mass
Johnny Depp used impressive cloaking devices to portray the flouncy Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the loony Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.
While he is almost unrecognizable again as crime boss Whitey Bulger in Black Mass, there is nothing fanciful about his latest disguise.
The actor’s shroud is devoted to exposing the essence of a balding psychopathic killer, yet he credits Black Mass director Scott Cooper for what appears to be a rejuvenating performance.
“I can only thank Scott for reviving my career,” says Depp during an exclusive Canadian interview with a trio of reporters before the movie’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere.
Indeed, pundits seem to agree that the 52-year-old’s Black Mass emoting puts him back on track after a string of uneven efforts in a series of movies, including Transcendence, Dark Shadows, The Lone Ranger and Mortdecai.
Black Mass is loosely based on the book by Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill who investigated the insidious link between Boston crime boss Bulger (Depp) and FBI Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).
The subsequent investigation led to Bulger escaping from his beloved Boston. After 16 years at large, Bulger was arrested in 2011 on the West Coast. He was subsequently sentenced to two life sentences for his part in extortion, racketeering and 11 murders.
The movie written by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth focuses on the decades-long illegal confederacy between Bulger and Connolly after Bulger cut a deal as an FBI informant to bring down a competing Mafia gang. It’s a story in two parts: One chronicles Bulger’s subsequent terrifying reign as the Irish-American crime kingpin of South Boston and beyond, while the other narrative recounts the FBI’s mistakes as Connolly becomes compromised.
Co-starring is Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Bulger’s brother, Billy, a powerful lawyer and politician. Dakota Johnson is Bulger’s long-suffering girlfriend. Kevin Bacon portrays the FBI chief who finally realizes Connolly has been corrupted.
But it is Depp’s performance embracing the lethal Bulger that drives the crime drama. And Cooper says that he was impressed with his headliner from the day they started filming in and around Boston.
“He is one of the most soulful and gentle and kind and thoughtful people that I know,” Cooper says of Depp. “So it was not the (physical) transformation that impressed me. It was the emotional and psychological leap from this man to the man you see on the screen, and it is mesmerizing.”
Still, Depp, always diligent, obsessed over his Bulger look and his wardrobe, and hired renowned makeup artist Joel Harlow who developed Captain Jack Sparrow’s personal envelope. They collaborated on Bulger’s “physical suit of skin” for weeks offering five or six variations before Cooper approved of one.
Depp also asked to meet with the imprisoned Bulger but was denied access, so he listened to audio tapes and screened some surveillance footage of the mobster. Assembling the emotional side of the deadly crime boss tended to be a work-in-progress as they filmed.
“One of the things we talked about early on was to never approach these characters, especially (Whitey) Bulger, as a gangster or a bad guy or a killer,” Depp says. “It would have been kind of the easy way to go and the wrong way to go.”
Instead, the actor and the director define an amoral power broker “who worships his mother and worships his brother and his friends and the people in the neighbourhood.”
But he’s a dictator who turns violently murderous when he’s crossed.
“It’s like a light switch going off,” Depp says. “It was his business. I don’t think he understood anything else.”
Key, too, is the relationship between Depp’s dominant Bulger and Edgerton’s wavering Connolly who succumbs to the gangster’s control.
In keeping with Cooper’s minimalist rehearsal process, the actors mostly let it flow during their multiple moments together.
“We would work it out as a scene progressed,” says Depp. “Joel (Edgerton) and I never discussed any of that (motivation). We just went in there with our own objectives.”
Meanwhile, with his thespian validation back, Depp is returning to his box-office strengths.
He’s Captain Jack in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales set for a high-profile release in July of 2017. He’s also revisiting the Mad Hatter in Alice Through the Looking Glass in theatres next May.
In other words, it’s good to be Johnny Depp once more.