(Credit: Netflix)

After spending the first 20 years of his career doing everything in his power to avoid becoming a movie star, Johnny Depp ended up landing the first Academy Award nomination of his career when he finally gave into the lure of big paycheques and broad blockbusters.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl got him on the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist, launched one of 21st century cinema’s most iconic characters, spawned a franchise that earned billions, and transformed the industry’s independent maverick into the single highest-paid actor in Hollywood.

Suddenly, Depp became a fixture of expensive and effects-driven epics, which ultimately did him more harm than good. The Pirates sequels were reliable earners, but the flops quickly started mounting up when The Lone Ranger, Transcendence, and Mortdecai combined to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

A change was needed, which led Depp directly towards his best dramatic performance in years, when he buried himself under prosthetics to play fearsome gangster Whitey Bulger in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass. A fixture of American folklore, the crime boss famously went into exile for 16 years when his inside man in the FBI tipped him off that the walls were closing in.

Bulger pursued a life of crime that was in direct opposition to his brother, Bill, a politician who became the longest-tenured senate president in Massachusetts history. With self-preservation at the forefront, Whitey entered into an alliance with the FBI to assist them in the fight against the Italian mob, opening the door for Irish gangsters to take their spot.

There’s always an air of cynicism when a well-known actor transforms themselves into someone unrecognisable for the sake of a part, which can often feel like a transparent play for awards season recognition. Black Mass didn’t work out for Depp in that respect, but it was an accomplished performance that offered a timely reminder of his dramatic credentials.

Bulger was openly critical of the project and refused to even watch it, though, which in some weird way could be interpreted as the sign of a job well done by the cast and crew. Speaking of which, the stellar ensemble includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Edgerton, Jesse Plemons, Kevin Bacon, Dakota Johnson, and many more, with such an alluring ensemble – and Depp leading the line – helping to make Black Mass the eighth most-watched movie on Netflix in the United States.