Disappearing into character
Radical transformation to play Whitey Bulger nothing new for Johnny Depp
Tell Johnny Depp you didn’t notice him in his new movie Black Mass and he’ll smile and thank you. The vanishing act was intentional.
Behind receding white hair, blue contact lenses and a demonic smirk, he transforms into James “Whitey” Bulger, the monstrous crime lord who in the 1970s ruled South Boston and outfoxed the FBI before slipping away like a graveyard secret.
“It’s not an easy thing to take on board,” admits the affable three-time Oscar nominee, who has played any number of strange and wonderful characters, from pirates to vampires to the Mad Hatter and Willy Wonka.
“We did about five or six tests until we thought we got it right,” Depp tells a small gathering of journalists at TIFF, where
Black Mass had its Canadian premiere last weekend before Friday’s general theatrical release.
Depp and his makeup team had little to go on to fashion his searing portrait of Bulger, who was finally arrested in 2011 after decades on the lam, and is now behind bars on a series of criminal convictions, bloody murder among them.
The 86-year-old Mobster declined Depp’s request for a prison meeting, obliging the actor to immerse himself in a scant public record of “whatever minimal footage there is of Bulger, (plus) very minimal voice recordings of Bulger.”
He used the makeup as his “suit of armour” to get into the role, “just getting to understand that Southey proud Irish immigrant code of honour that has existed for centuries and exists today in the very same way.”
The effort paid off, resulting in one of the best dramatic roles in years for Depp, 52, after a long stretch of mostly comedic performances.
But it wasn’t the makeup that awed Black Mass director Scott Cooper, who joined Depp and co-star Joel Edgerton for a roundtable interview. It was Depp’s ability to summon Bulger’s evil essence.
“The transformation that most impressed me was the emotional and interior and the psychological leap from this man to the man you see on screen,” Cooper says.
The last thing Depp wanted to do was depict Bulger and his band of violent thugs as conventional movie bad guys.
“One of the things we talked about early on, the most important thing, was to not ever approach these characters, especially Jimmy Bulger, as a gangster or a bad guy or a killer or a this or a that.
“It would have been the easy way to go and the wrong way to go. Instead we approached him as a human being with feelings, with love, a guy who worships his mother, and worships his brother and his friends and the people in the neighbourhood that he’s taken care of for years . . . and then to try to understand what it is that can allow him to kill so easily without any real remorse, you know?
“It was his business. His business. And the language of that business was violence.”
Depp met a real Whitey Bulger type years ago, when he was making the 1997 crime drama Donnie Brasco. In that film, he worked both sides of the street playing an FBI agent who goes undercover as a new recruit for a Mobster played by Al Pacino.
“I knew guys when I was doing Donnie Brasco. I have had a lot of guys from the FBI in the daytime to mob friends at night who I learned a lot from and became very close with.
“There was this one big dude, a really big guy, he wanted to bring his family and to have his photograph taken, and eat lasagna.
“And he was the trigger man. He was the one that put two in the head (Depp makes a headshot gesture). But he was . . . best father, great father, and that’s the thing. That’s really their business.”