Actor Mark Strong will soon be popping up in a trio of genre films as a bad, bad man. This month, he will portray Lord Blackwood in the Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes, opening Christmas Day. Strong has also completed filming on Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, in which he plays a mobster, and he is currently awaiting the start of filming for Andrew Stanton's John Carter of Mars, in which he will play the shape-shifter Matai Shang.
In a recent interview with Collider, Strong described his character in Kick-Ass:
"I play a character called Frank D’Amico. He’s a New York mafia boss. He’s basically been dealing drugs and running rackets all his life. He’s achieved a place now in his life where he’s very well feared and he’s starting to wind everything down and just at that point a bunch of teenagers who want to be superheroes seem to be messing up his business, so he decides to go after them with everything at his disposal. That’s the character. Were we aware we were making something [special]? No not really, because Matthew, you know, it’s only Matthew’s 3rd film. He’d gone around the studios with the script and they all turned him down. We were making it on a very small budget that he’d been able to raise himself, so we weren’t sure. Having said that, Matthew was 100% confident that what he was making was going to be brilliant. I mean, he said he never felt like that about a film since Lock Stock [and Two Smoking Barrels]. He just knew what he wanted to do with it and he knew he could make a success of it. Personally, I mean I found beating up small children very difficult to cope with. Going to work and strangling 10 year old girls is not what I imagined I would be doing at my age, but having seen a rough-cut of the movie it’s really exciting and very different and that’s, I think, probably what people are responding to."