For his new role, Taron Egerton went from gold hot pants to a prison jumpsuit.
The 32-year-old actor, who has laid low since his Golden Globe-winning turn as Elton John in the 2019 biopic “Rocketman,” is back in front of the camera in Apple TV+’s “Black Bird,” playing a former high school hotshot and cop’s son who gets busted for dealing drugs to fuel his lavish lifestyle.
The show also stars Ray Liotta, in one of his last projects before he died in his sleep in the Dominican Republic in late May.
Facing 10 years behind bars at a minimum security prison, Jimmy Keene (Egerton) is instead offered a trade: install himself in a higher security prison and befriend a suspected serial killer, Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser). If Jimmy can get a confession out of Larry for the rape and murder of at least one of his possibly dozen victims, he gets out.
“Jimmy and Larry are sat at different spaces on a spectrum. And I don’t know what that spectrum is, whether it’s misogynists or whatever, but Jimmy is a character who, at the start of the story, is hard to like. And maybe you shouldn’t like him because he’s somebody who’s engaged in things that are wrong and his attitude toward women, certainly, is pretty repellent,” Egerton told the Daily News.
“But what happens over the course of the story is that through this prolonged encounter with Larry Hall, he is able to recognize some of the terrible things that make Larry who he is are reflected back in (Jimmy). He sees something of a shared ideology, and Larry instinctively knows that. He instinctively feels that there is something kindred, and it’s through that that Jimmy learns some humility because he’s horrified by it and he’s disturbed by it and it nearly breaks him. To be confronted by your own nature and to see something you don’t like, I mean, what a thing.”
Egerton, who was born in England and raised in Wales, has done the bad boy bit before, playing the rough-and-tumble Eggsy in the “Kingsman” secret agent movies. This time, he said, he wanted to show a different side.
In “Black Bird,” written by Dennis Lehane and based on the real James Keene’s 2010 autobiography, “In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption,” Jimmy is cool, sometimes cruelly so, but he can blend anywhere. The police officers who enlist him, FBI Agent Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi) and local sheriff Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) know they — and he — can use that charisma to trick Larry, a Civil War nerd with goofy sideburns, a grating voice and an almost childlike naivety, into thinking they’re friends, or at least someone he wants to spill his secrets to.
“He has this incredible facility to be a social chameleon, to kind of let things bounce off him and to be The Guy — ‘I’m comfortable, I’m in control,’” Egerton said.
“‘What happens is it takes a toll on him ... He looks into Larry’s eyes and he looks into the void and it becomes too much for him. He sort of barely makes it through.”
At first, Jimmy goes in to earn his freedom, both for himself and his ailing father (Liotta). But at some point, his motivation shifts. He wants to get Larry to confess because he needs this sick man to face consequences for his actions.
But the show never pretends to be a redemption story. Jimmy and Larry are both criminals and squeezing out a confession from the latter will not change that. “Black Bird,” like Netflix’s “Mindhunter” before it, is more about the psychology than the true crime: what possesses a man to commit such heinous misdeeds?
For Jimmy to succeed in his task, he has to get into the head of a twisted soul. He has to gaze into the darkness of a man accused of raping and murdering young girls, ponytails twisting in the wind as they ride their bicycles down dirt roads. He has to convince Larry that they are the same.
“He doesn’t end up somebody whole,” Egerton told The News. “He ends up somebody who’s got a bit of a crack in him that’s never going to be fixed.”
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