Director Elegance Bratton tells EW how he adapted the film’s incredible true story.

How Mark Wahlberg made a real-life mafia hitman’s son cry behind the scenes of By Any Means

Director Elegance Bratton tells EW how he adapted the film’s incredible true story.

By Mike Miller

Mike Miller

Mike Miller is the executive editor on the movies team at . He previously worked as a writer-reporter for PEOPLE and TMZ.

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September 4, 2026 12:44 p.m. ET

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Mark Wahlberg in ‘By Any Means’. Credit:

Daniel McFadden/Paramount Pictures

- Mark Wahlberg stars as a real-life mafia hitman, Greg Scarpa, in *By Any Means.*

- The film tells the true story of how the FBI contracted Scarpa to help solve the murder of a civil rights leader in 1960s Mississippi.

- Wahlberg’s portrayal of the mafioso was so convincing that it caused his son to break down in tears on set.

Not everything in Mark Wahlberg’s new film *By Any Means* is based entirely on historical facts, but his portrayal of a real-life mafia hitman was good enough to pass the ultimate test.

In the based-on-a-true-story thriller, now in theaters, Wahlberg plays Greg Scarpa, a notorious mafioso who the FBI contracted to investigate — through violent, extralegal means — the Ku Klux Klan’s murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (played by Giancarlo Esposito) in 1960s Mississippi.

Scarpa’s real son and daughter, as well as Dahmer’s widow and daughter, served as advisors on the film. Director Elegance Bratton tells * *that one scene, based on a memory Scarpa’s son shared with him, felt so real to Scarpa Jr. that he burst into tears on set.

Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘By Any Means’.

Eli Ade/Paramount Pictures

“I hear crying from the video tents, and it’s Greg Scarpa Jr., and he’s crying ‘Daddy, daddy,’ because Mark looks so much like his father in makeup, and the house looks so much like the house he grew up in, that he was brought right back to that 13-year-old kid in the ‘60s,” Bratton says.

“That’s the stamp of approval that I’m most interested in,” he adds of the film’s realism. “And gratefully, I had a wonderful makeup department head, Howard Berger, who was able to handle that transformation.”

Below, Bratton reveals how he blended fact and fiction, including inventing the character Wayne Strider, an FBI agent played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, to expose a deeper truth in a story that feels too fantastic to be real.

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Mark Wahlberg and Greg Scarpa Jr. at the ‘By Any Means’ premiere in Los Angeles on Sept. 1.

Phillip Faraone/Getty

**: You came on to direct a script by Sascha Penn that had already turned these historical events into a thriller. When you first read it, what did you understand the film’s relationship to the real story to be?**

**ELEGANCE BRATTON:** When I first read it, I had no bearing on how much it had to do with the real story, and where the line between fact and fiction was drawn. So I had to rely on my documentary experience. My husband, Chester, and I began an exhaustive research process that included the Dahmer family, particularly Bettie Dahmer, Vernon’s daughter, who was with him the night of the fire, and Ellie Dahmer, his widow, who was also with him that night.

I spoke to the Scarpa children, Greg Scarpa Jr. and Linda Scarpa, about their father. I spoke to the FBI for clarification on what activities happened. And incidentally, I found a lot of stuff. It wasn’t so much about this particular case, but seeing what Greg Scarpa was able to get away with in the rest of his career outside of the civil rights movement with the FBI had a lot to do with how the script was reshaped.

Finally, I spoke to the prosecuting judge of Billy Roy Pitts, the Klansman, who put the hit out on Vernon. And I spoke to some surviving Klan members, some related, some not, to understand the culture of the Klan.

Gregory Scarpa Sr.

Anthony Casale/NY Daily News via Getty

**Does anything stand out from your research that led to changes with the story? **

There are a few things. So, Vernon Dahmer is the moral center of our story. He was a civil rights activist, a family man who was killed because he believed that Black people had the right to vote. And when you’re making this type of movie, and you’re dealing with such inflammatory imagery, my first instinct was to be like, “I wanna be innovative in how I do this, and I don’t wanna repeat what has hit me in a negative way with other films.”

So, in speaking to Betty about her experience, I realized that the attack needed to be filmed from the inside because these people, these Klansmen that burned down their house, they were under hoods and in the shadows, right? They had the audacity to want to kill this family, but lacked the courage to show their face.

I’ve never really seen a scene like this depicted in a film where we’re totally with the Black family. So when she said that, I was like, “Okay, I have to film this differently. I have to make sure that I can stay with them. I don’t have to go outside. I don’t have to make the movie where we watch the Klan commit violence, but instead make the movie where we understand what it feels like to be attacked.”

Giancarlo Esposito as Vernon Dahmer in ‘By Any Means’.

Eli Ade/Paramount Pictures

**The film is inspired by true events, but that can be a broad phrase. If someone walked out of the movie and asked you, “What really happened, and what did you invent?” how would you answer them?**

First of all, I was raised by drag queens, so you never wanna admit where the line between the man and the woman is formed fully, right? ‘Cause then you destroy the illusion.

But what I will say is Wayne Strider does not exist. Wayne Strider is someone that I created, or rather that Sascha Penn created, and I had some say in how he evolved.

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**Why was that important to telling this story? **

I wanted to drop the audience into the point of view of a Black protagonist, which is something you really don’t get with movies about this time in history. A lot of times, civil rights movies are about the white people and how they’re changed by the movement and not necessarily about the material conditions of the Black people who are experiencing the most strife.

Additionally, I was very much interested in the script because it had all this genre going on; it was not your grandma’s civil rights movie, right? That was important for me to expand on and preserve. But when it’s all said and done, I want you to think about Vernon Dahmer.

So when it comes to that line between what’s real and what’s not real in the movie, I’m always looking for an expression of emotional truth, even if the exact situation didn’t happen. Sometimes the emotional logic of things can be invented yet still be rooted in the truth of what actually occurred.

**What is the real historical basis for Wayne Strider?**

When it first came to me, I didn’t know this was true. I had to get with Linda Schiro, Scarpa’s long-term lover, and her daughter, Linda, to understand. But apparently there was a Black agent assigned to Scarpa whenever he went down South to do this work, but that agent’s name is lost to history, and that agent isn’t necessarily depicted as the lead, right? That agent is someone who seems as though they’re just kind of holding Scarpa’s suitcase while he does the work.

There’s this wonderful article that Yahya brought to my attention in *Life Magazine* from the ‘60s where they talked about the Black agents in Hoover’s FBI. And that article had a lot to do with how I wrote Wayne, because as much as they are pioneers and they’re breaking barriers, they were also kind of like stage ponies for Hoover. They were caught in a vice, representing a change they didn’t get to experience while in uniform.

Linda Scarpa, Mark Wahlberg, Greg Scarpa Jr., and Greg Scarpa III attend the ‘By Any Means’ premiere.

Phillip Faraone/Getty

**How did having Greg Scarpa’s children advise on the film affect the portrayal—and how did you navigate the difference between family memory and the historical record?**

Well, with Greg, the thing about it is, people are complex. They have many different layers. So with Greg Scarpa Jr., I can tell you a story. There’s a scene in the movie where Scarpa gets the job from the FBI, and he’s having dinner with his family. And the scene itself actually came from Greg Scarpa Jr. We had planned a totally different scene, totally different dialogue, totally different characters; everything was different. And Greg told me the story of how his father reacted after he got into a fight in school and he lost, and I was like, “Oh, wow, this tells me more about who this man is as a father than what I made up.” The truth is actually better than fiction, you know?

That’s something I can say overall about my process of telling stories. It’s always a dance between: Is the real thing cinematic? And if not, what is the cinematic nature of the truth? And how am I able to transmit that in a way that is engaging to the audience, and not interested in apologizing for itself, but confident in its expression of what is real? Whether or not it happened, there are still real emotions involved. All that to say, that scene took on a totally new life because Scarpa told me that story.

Bettie Dahmer at the ‘By Any Means’ premiere in Los Angeles on Sept. 1.

Jesse Grant/Getty

**Did having Vernon Dahmer’s daughter visit the set change the way you approached his character? **

Having Bettie become a vocal partner in this helped to validate my initial instincts that the only reason this story needs to exist is because of what happened to Vernon Dahmer. His real death, his real assassination, the real and blatant cowardice and terrorism of his murder is what sparks a chain of events that leads to Greg Scarpa actually going to Mississippi.

But I wanted to create a cinematic language that could root us in a Black protagonist in this story. And, ultimately, Greg Scarpa is a tool, a dangerous tool. And Yahya’s character, Wayne Strider, has to decide how much he can use this tool without becoming Greg Scarpa.

**You’ve said that you don’t necessarily see documentary and fiction as fundamentally different. When you’re working with real history like this, how do you decide when a fact is sacred and when it can be reshaped?**

To me, it’s all about the cinematic quality. I’m gonna tell you a story. It’s a crazy story. So, my husband, Chester, bought me a new pair of these limited-edition New Balance sneakers that I was obsessed with. And we got home late from dinner, and an addicted person stole them off our porch. And Chester proceeded to go to other addicted people on our corner and find out where this addicted person who was houseless laid her head down at night to get high, and went to the crack house and screamed, “Come outside, give me my sneakers back!”

If I took that story into a pitch meeting in Hollywood, people would be like, “There’s no way that happened. That is too campy or too melodramatic to actually be real,” right? So this idea that authenticity is couched in depicting the actual thing, nine times out of 10, the thing that happens is so outrageous that people won’t believe it happened to you anyway, right? So in this movie, it’s very easy for Greg Scarpa to careen either into some sort of mafia clown stereotype or like a white savior thing, right?

Vernon’s son, Harold Dahmer, at the ‘By Any Means’ premiere.

Phillip Faraone/Getty

**With *The Inspection,* you had the authority of your own memory—you knew what happened to you, and you could change details in pursuit of what you called the emotional truth. How was it different doing that with a history that belonged to other people?**

*By Any Means*, for me, answers the question of what an Elegance Bratton movie looks like at scale.

I’ve expanded upon my interests. I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned them in any way. I’m interested in institutions. I’m interested in masculinity. I’m interested in what happens to men when institutions betray them. Who do they become? What I learned from *The Inspection* is that you’re looking for something that approaches cultural memory. I’m not so beholden to the notion that I have to pick one objective truth over another for the project to be right.

Instead, I’m interested in a reality where multiple things can be true at once, and we focus on the complexity of the human condition and revel in the endless possibilities of how we can change the world, how we can become whatever we want to be. And I think that is way more interesting than just the truth.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.*

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