After it all fell apart last year, Black Mass is back on track with Johnny Depp signed up once more for the lead role, and Joel Edgerton co-starring, with Scott Cooper set to direct. Now Variety reports another great actor has signed on, as Guy Pearce will also star.
The film is a biopic of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger (Johnny Depp), a Boston criminal who ended up becoming an FBI informant, with the help of his longtime friend and FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) and his brother (Guy Pearce), who was the former President of the Massachussets State Senate. However Whitey didn’t completely turn good guy, as his tips to the feds were mainly about getting rid of his mob competition.
When Connolly tipped Bulger off that the feds were planning on double-crossing him, the criminal went into hiding for more than a decade, rising to the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list before he was eventually caught in 2011 while hiding out in Santa Monica, California.
Bulger served as the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello in The Departed and Pete Postlethwaite’s Fergus ‘Fergie’ Colm in The Town.
Filming is set to start this spring in Boston, with an October 2015 release date set.
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