See Marilyn Manson Play Native American Hit Man in Movie Trailer
Let Me Make You a Martyr, the upcoming, harrowing new crime movie about an abusive father, is set to reunite Sons of Anarchy’s Mark Boone Junior with shock rocker and erstwhile Sons actor Marilyn Manson. While the film won’t arrive until next year, check out an exclusive trailer featuring Manson as a Native American hit man.
Boone plays Larry Glass, a character whom the movie’s producers describe as “a drug dealer, pimp and all-around scumbag,” who hires Manson’s character Pope, a hit man (or “bogeyman,” as Manson describes it), to find and kill the grown-up adopted son rebelling against him.
As the cryptic trailer shows, much of the drama revolves around the son (Niko Nicotera) and the adopted sister (Sam Quartin) he’s fallen in love with and how they’re trying to break free from Boone’s character’s clutches. Nicotera and Quartin’s characters meet in a diner as Manson looks at them ominously. Meanwhile, Nicotera tells a story about finding peace in chaos juxtaposed with shots of Manson covered in blood and Boone driving.
For Manson, it was a welcome reunion with Boone. “Mark brought me into the project,” Manson says. “We were friends from Sons of Anarchy. He’s sort of my unwanted mentor. He tells me what to do. He’s always encouraged me, but he’s very bossy about it. He says things like, ‘You gotta do this, motherfucker. You’ll like this.'”
“He’s no spring chicken,” Boone says lovingly and carefully of why he prods Manson into acting. “Who wants to be a rock & roll star his entire life? I thought he was the perfect choice for this.”
Boone came into the project via co-writer and co-director John Swab, who based the story partly on his own life. “It felt very authentic,” Boone says. The film had grown out of a half-hour short that Swab made with Martyr partner Corey Asraf, titled Judas’ Chariot, which starred Quartin, but Boone took on the feature-length movie without seeing its predecessor because, as he puts it, “I trusted my feelings about John.”
In addition to Sons, the actor had been working with Manson on a TV show he’s been trying to launch called Dave and Shim, for which there are already a number of YouTube shorts. “[Manson’s] just a monster intellect and a fascinating guy and [Dave and Shim] offered him the chance to sink his teeth into an acting role, which, at the time, he’d never had before,” Boone says. “He’s so hilariously fantastic and such a quick-witted human.”
“I just had to observe the level of poverty and white trash element to the story,” says Manson. “Just seeing that, I knew where to go”
With Let Me Make You a Martyr, Boone’s gut instincts about Manson were spot-on, as the rocker loved the role.
“Within the first day, I was asked if I wanted to skin a coyote,” the singer says excitedly. “It was already dead. And I was asked to burn down a house and ‘kill’ a bunch of people, so the answer was ‘yes’ obviously.”
Beyond the shocking hijinks, Manson says he was able to fall into character easily upon arriving in Tulsa for the shoot. “I just had to observe the level of poverty and, I guess, white trash element to the story,” he says. “The house where my character lives, sort of on a swamp on a reservation, looked like a combination between Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Apocalypse Now. It was pretty epic. Just seeing that, I knew where to go.”