Fresh off of Entertainment Weekly dropping a handful of first-look images at By Any Means, a crime thriller set during the Civil Rights era, we’ve got a full trailer. The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and recently had a test screening. Wahlberg’s portrayal of real-life mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa apparently left the audience screaming and yelling. “It was crazy,” Wahlberg said. “The response in the theater is really like nothing I’ve ever seen before.“
All About the Movie
Set in Mississippi in 1966, By Any Means follows “a volatile partnership between a hardened mafia hitman and a young Black FBI agent as they are forced into an uneasy alliance to track down those responsible for the killing of civil rights leaders — uncovering a conspiracy that tests the limits of justice, loyalty, and survival.” The film is directed by Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) and written by Sascha Penn (Power Book III: Raising Kanan).
The real events involved the FBI looking into the disappearance of three missing civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. They believed they had been murdered, but were unable to locate their bodies. They turned to Gregory Scarpa, a hitman for the Colombo crime family and an FBI informant. Scarpa was able to use…different means of interrogation, which basically involved beating the shit out of people until they told him what he wanted to know.
The film Mississippi Burning, starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, is also loosely based on these events.
Scarpa’s real-life children, Gregory and Linda, served as advisors on the film, and Wahlberg said that spending time with them helped to humanize his character. “He lived in this underworld, and he kind of had to play by those rules, but he was still a father and a husband,” he said. “I think that was the kind of thing that made me feel more comfortable.“
Here’s the poster:
By Any Means will hit theaters on September 4.
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