The movie that left Sienna Miller on the cutting room floor: “I hope I do it justice”
Her career has been dogged by personal scandal, press intrusion, and major periods of drought, but Sienna Miller’s CV boasts some pretty impressive stuff, from Guy Ritchie‘s Layer Cake to Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, and while that’s not too shabby, her filmography could have been even deeper.
Miller allegedly turned the part of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, which might have been for the best, given her history with Daniel Craig. Moreover, she refused to star in an unknown Broadway production over a massive disparity in wages between her and her male co-stars, to which the producers allegedly responded by telling Miller to “Fuck off”, and then there’s the tale of Black Mass, which she was kind of in, but also kind of wasn’t.
Released in 2015, Black Mass is a biopic about the life and crimes of infamous gangster Whitey Bulger, with Johnny Depp starring as the balding gangster, and the rest of the cast consisting of Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Dakota Johnson, and many other huge names.
Miller was initially cast as Catherine Greig, Bulger’s significantly younger girlfriend during his years on the run, a role she took incredibly seriously, regularly attending dialect lessons to perfect Greig’s telltale Massachusetts accent.
“Up until the day before I flew here, I couldn’t do it, and it sounded stupid,” she told The Boston Globe, “And I was sort of religiously watching every film ever set in South Boston: Good Will Hunting, Gone Baby Gone, The Town. Catherine had a thick accent, so I hope I do it justice.”
The English star was spotted numerous times on the set of the movie, including in a scene opposite Depp, and yet, she’s nowhere to be found in the final cut, wherein director Scott Cooper is quoted in that same article that the decision to remove Miller’s scenes from the finished movie “came down to narrative choices”.
In his words, he wanted the story to focus more on Bulger’s time at the height of his criminal powers, not his years on the lam, and despite Miller supposedly being “fantastic”, her section of the narrative was simply “less dramatic” than what remained in the theatrical release.
Miller wasn’t the only actor left scratching their head while watching Black Mass; Erica McDermott of The Fighter fame was cast in the role of Mary Bulger, the wife of Whitey’s brother, Billy, played by Cumberbatch. After initially believing she would have a larger role in the story, most of her scenes were cut from the final product, and since she was born and raised in New England, her accent clearly had nothing to do with it.
Black Mass turned out to be a fairly decent gangster flick, and while it’s not like Miller and McDermott were cut from one of the best films of the year or something, it’s a little bit worrying that those in charge were so trigger-happy when it came to losing two female characters from this very macho movie, bad accent or otherwise.
