Johnny Depp Makes One Scary Gangster in 'Black Mass' Trailer

Here’s the Johnny Depp movie we’ve been waiting for. After a string of misfires in recent years that includes Mortdecai, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, and Dark Shadows, Depp fans — and, according to census reports, there are kajillions — are probably getting a getting a little itchy for the eccentric actor to show and prove again.

And from the looks of the first trailer for Black Mass — in which Depp plays real-life ruthless gangster Whitey Bulger — Johnny be good again. Really good. Watch it above.

The first look is framed around a tense dinner table conversation that recalls the best of Joe Pesci’s will-he-or-won’t-he-shoot-that-guy-in-the-face routine from Goodfellas. It’s our introduction to Depp’s balding, blue-eyed, Boston-drawled badass. (The actor is wearing contacts for the part, and as we noted after the first photo hit yesterday, welcomes back that receding hairline he embraced as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing Las Vegas.) And this is a man you don’t want to cross… or share your secret family recipe with.

Whitey Bulger is one of the most infamous figures in American organized crime, having been indicted on 19 murders, and his story hardly fits the traditional rise-and-fall narrative. After serving as an informant for the FBI, Bulger fled and went into hiding for 16 years. For more than a decade he was listed second on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, after only Osama bin Laden.

While Depp impresses as Bulger, so does the list of actors playing the men tip-toeing around him, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Edgerton, Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott, Jesse Plemons, and Peter Sarsgaard. Also appearing are Fifty Shades of Grey breakout Dakota Johnson as Bulger’s main squeeze Lindsey Cyr, and Juno Temple as his ill-fated stepdaughter Deborah Hussey.

Black Mass, directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace), opens Sept. 18. It’s a likely candidate to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival a week earlier.