FIRST LOOK SHOCK: Mark Wahlberg’s unhinged crime transformation for By Any Means just shattered the internet!

Mark Wahlberg is ready for audiences to shout and cheer at the screen when his latest action film hits theaters.

He’s already had a taste of it; at a test screening for the upcoming By Any Means, in which Wahlberg plays real-life mafia hitman Gregory Scarpa, people were screaming and yelling, he tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was crazy.”

“The response in the theater is really like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Wahlberg says.

The film, directed by Elegance Bratton, sees Wahlberg’s Scarpa and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s FBI agent Wayne Strider team up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders in 1960s Mississippi — and fight members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Inspired by a true story, the premise offers audiences “so much wish fulfillment,” Wahlberg says.

“This is going to be one of the great revenge thrillers in quite a long time,” he adds.

EW has the exclusive first look at the Paramount film, arriving in theaters this September. In the photos, Wahlberg is transformed into Scarpa, wearing tinted aviator glasses and longer hair that’s combed over in a side part. Wahlberg’s hair and makeup are so uncanny that Scarpa’s real son, Gregory Scarpa Jr., could have mistaken him for his real father, who died in 1994.

“He goes to Mark, ‘Hey, dad,’ ’cause he thought Mark looked so much like his dad,” Bratton recalls of Scarpa Jr. upon seeing Wahlberg on the first day during a makeup test.

Scarpa Jr. and his sister, Linda Scarpa, were both advisors on the film. Wahlberg says spending time with his character’s real-life children “humanized” Scarpa for him.

“He lived in this underworld, and he kind of had to play by those rules, but he was still a father and a husband,” the Balls Up actor says. “I think that was the kind of thing that made me feel more comfortable.”

By Any Means is Bratton’s second feature film, following 2022’s The Inspection. The filmmaker says he was drawn to the script, written by Sascha Penn, while looking to make a film about “people who are battling institutions that are failing them.”

“When I saw this script about a Black FBI agent and a mafia hitman joining forces, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, what an incredible commentary,’” he tells EW.

Learning about what happened to civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, who is portrayed in the film by Giancarlo Esposito, sealed the deal for Bratton. Dahmer, who helped Black Americans register to vote and offered to pay voters’ poll taxes, died in 1966 after the KKK set his home on fire while he and his family were inside. The KKK also burned down his grocery store, where he kept a voter registration book.

“They really did burn down his home, he was murdered by them, and we had [Dahmer’s daughter] Bettie Dahmer, a survivor of the attack, on set the day we filmed this scene,” Bratton says. “All of that history honestly made it incredibly satisfying to kick the KKK’s ass every day while making this film. I can’t wait for audiences around the world to enjoy that same satisfaction.”

While the story is based on true events, Bratton didn’t want his feature to feel like a “history lesson.”

“This is a story about justice moving through corrupted systems,” he shares. “I wanted this film to feel muscular, entertaining, and haunted at the same time.”

The attack on the Dahmer family is one of the incidents that push Wahlberg and Abdul-Mateen II’s characters together, creating an unconventional pairing of a mobster and an FBI agent.

“Wayne was fighting for, or is supposed to stand for, what is morally right, and right in the eyes of justice, and then Scarpa’s character stands for what is necessary,” Abdul-Mateen II says of the pair’s dynamics.

Wayne is “a good man” who is “trying to stay good in a wicked world,” he adds. “That was what really drew me in, was figuring out how long I could take Wayne through this world and keep him good, before he had to make a choice. That’s what was most exciting for me.

And although the Wonder Man star has filmed his share of action scenes, he says the fight scenes in the film are “some of the best fight scenes that I’ve done.”

Wahlberg and Abdul-Mateen II had never met before By Any Means, but Bratton says the duo had a strong on-screen dynamic.

“When you’re around them together, they kind of complete each other’s sentences,” he says. “They have a lot of nonverbal communication that’s also quite interesting.”