Messina lays bare his inner gangster
What actor doesn’t want to be cast against type? In the case of Chris Messina, his role in the screen adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Prohibition-era best-selling novel “Live by Night” should help put distance between him and Danny Castellano, the lovably prickly OB-GYN he played on “The Mindy Project.” In “Live by Night,” which stars Ben Affleck (who also directs), Messina is Dion Bartolo, the swaggering hatchet man to Affleck’s rum runner.
How did Messina manage to locate the unconcealed glee that Dion brings to wasting his enemies and living a restraint-free life? “I’ve been around long enough to know that they don’t make movies like this anymore — and when they do, they don’t cast me — so I had such a joy in being there,” says Messina, 42, who as a stage actor played all manner of men, but in film and TV found himself locked into a nice-guy niche. “Ben saw something else in me, and I was so thankful for him to break that weird curse.”
The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Talk about the genesis of Dion’s look.
A: I knew (Ben) didn’t want me to be coming off “The Mindy Project” to be the handsome doctor guy. In the book, Dion has a lust for life, smoking cigars, driving fast cars; he loves being a gangster. So I said to myself, “I’ll put on a little weight and see what that does.” I ate pasta, cookies, ice cream. When we were Chris Messina stars as a gang enforcer alongside Ben Affleck’s rum runner in the new film “Live by Night.” shooting, I’d have a beer or a bagel by my bedside table, and if I woke up at 2 a.m., I’d drink the rest of the beer or eat the bagel and go back to sleep. By the end of the shoot, I was 202 pounds.
Q: Dion’s fussy mustache. What’s the story with that?
A: I went to meet with the costume designer (Jacqueline West), and I said, “Ben’s so tall and wide. I’m so small. I’m struggling, honestly, with the idea of me being next to him and playing the enforcer.” And she said, “Look at Frank Nitti, Capone’s righthand man. Frank Nitti was smaller than Capone, but he was the one everyone was scared of.” Frank Nitti had this little mustache. It wasn’t the style at the time, but she felt like it showed how rebellious Dion was.
Q: Did you throw yourself a gangster movie marathon?
A: I watched “The Public Enemy” with (James) Cagney a lot because he had this grin, a joy of being a gangster. I couldn’t stop watching Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas.” Every day I’d watch “Raging Bull” because there’s such a love between those two broth- ers. I thought, “That’s what should be between Joe and Dion.” They’re so tough, but at the end of the day they love each other.
Q: Your wife, Jennifer Todd, runs Ben and Matt Damon’s production company and is a producer on “Live by Night.”
A: She’s also the one who said to me, “Ben mentioned you for this role in ‘Live by Night.’ ” I really enjoy working with her, and when you get to see someone you love in their element, thriving, it’s pretty cool.
Q: What did you bring to “Live by Night” that you learned from an improv-happy series like “The Mindy Project”?
A: There’s this thing they do in a lot of comedies; they lob (alternative) lines at you. At first, it really annoyed me, especially because I was terrible at it. I was used to getting a script, preparing as long as I could. But something comes from jumping off a bridge, being less precious about (the work), laughing. That was the feeling I tried to bring to “Live by Night.”