Paramount Pictures has released a new featurette exploring the extraordinary true events that inspired By Any Means, the upcoming historical crime thriller starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg.
Set in 1960s Mississippi, the film follows Wayne Strider, a young Black FBI agent sent to investigate a wave of brutal killings targeting civil rights leaders. With conventional law enforcement failing to deliver justice, Strider is forced into an uneasy alliance with Gregory Scarpa, a notorious mafia hitman and secret FBI informant.
Mark Wahlberg undergoes a dramatic physical transformation to portray Scarpa, a feared member of New York’s Colombo crime family who became known as “The Grim Reaper.” Despite his extensive involvement in organised crime, Scarpa maintained a long and deeply controversial relationship with the FBI.
The historical events behind the film include the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi businessman, NAACP leader and voting rights activist. Dahmer regularly helped Black citizens register to vote and publicly offered to pay poll taxes for those unable to afford them.
In January 1966, members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked the Dahmer family home and grocery store with gunfire and firebombs. Dahmer remained inside long enough to defend his family and help them escape, but suffered fatal injuries and died later that day.
Giancarlo Esposito portrays Dahmer in the film. Director Elegance Bratton has revealed that Dahmer’s daughter Bettie, who survived the attack, was present on set when the production recreated the devastating event.
Following Dahmer’s murder, historical records indicate that the FBI requested the assistance of an informant identified as NY-3461 — Gregory Scarpa — for a special assignment in Mississippi. Accounts of Scarpa’s involvement describe the Bureau turning to a violent criminal capable of using methods its own agents could not legally employ.
The precise details of Scarpa’s activities remain disputed, but his alleged involvement has become one of the most disturbing examples of the compromises made by law enforcement while pursuing the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights era.
In the film, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Wayne Strider represents a man attempting to remain morally principled while operating inside a corrupt and frequently hostile system. Scarpa, by contrast, represents what happens when the pursuit of justice abandons every conventional rule.
The new featurette includes interviews with Wahlberg, Abdul-Mateen II and Bratton, who discuss the unlikely partnership at the centre of the story and the responsibility involved in transforming painful historical events into an action-driven revenge thriller.
Directed by Elegance Bratton and written by Sascha Penn, By Any Means also stars Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, Ethan Embry, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze and David Strathairn.
Rather than presenting its story as a traditional historical drama, the film appears designed as a muscular crime thriller about institutional failure, moral compromise and two radically different men prepared to pursue justice beyond the limits of the law.
By Any Means arrives exclusively in cinemas on September 4, 2026.
Watch the official featurette below.
