The Paramount upcoming true-story thriller stars Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. They play an unlikely duo, and early audiences are already losing their minds over it. At a recent test screening, Wahlberg says the crowd was “screaming and yelling,” adding, “it was crazy.” He believes the film will be “one of the great revenge thrillers in quite a long time.”
Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II star in By Any Means first photos
Entertainment Weekly has released the exclusive first-look photos from By Any Means, directed by Elegance Bratton. In the images, Mark Wahlberg is transformed into real-life mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa with tinted aviator glasses and a side-combed hairstyle. The resemblance is so striking that Scarpa’s actual son, Gregory Scarpa Jr., reportedly mistook Wahlberg for his late father on the first day of makeup tests. “He goes to Mark, ‘Hey, dad,'” director Bratton recalls.
Set in 1960s Mississippi, By Any Means follows Scarpa and Abdul-Mateen II’s FBI agent Wayne Strider as they team up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders and confront Ku Klux Klan members. The story draws from real events, including the KKK’s brutal attack on civil rights figure Vernon Dahmer — played in the film by Giancarlo Esposito — whose home was set on fire in 1966 while his family was inside.
Both Scarpa Jr. and his sister Linda Scarpa served as advisors on the film. Wahlberg says working with them helped him find the humanity beneath his character’s violent exterior. “He lived in this underworld, and he kind of had to play by those rules, but he was still a father and a husband,” Wahlberg says.
Abdul-Mateen II describes his character Wayne as “a good man” trying to hold on to his moral compass in a corrupt world. The actor says he was drawn to the internal conflict, like how far Wayne could go before being forced to make a difficult choice. He also calls the film’s fight sequences “some of the best fight scenes that I’ve done.”
By Any Means opens in theaters on September 4.
Originally reported by Devanshi Basu on ComingSoon.net.
