After years of hard work and dogged persistence, actor Adam Mucci gets his breakthrough role in this summer’s much-anticipated Public Enemies.

By Lara De Meo

Over 13 years as a working actor, Adam Mucci MGSA’96 has come to expect a certain frequency of fizzle. You may nail the audition, but it doesn’t mean you’ll get the part. “Even if you’re good, you get told ‘no’ eight out of 10 times,” he says. And even if you do get the part, it doesn’t mean you’re in the movie. Mucci did a scene with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, but there wasn’t a trace of him in the final edit. And the lines he traded with Kate Winslet in two scenes of Revolutionary Road? Cut.

So when he gave a two-line audition for a minor part in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, which opens in July, then heard he was cast in a different role, he didn’t expect much—until he read the script. In the action thriller about legendary Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, Mucci would play the pivotal character of Harold Reinecke, an investigator working for top FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Reinecke is at the root of conflicts involving the FBI, Dillinger, and Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). Whereas Mucci’s past film roles have been nonessential, he says of this one, “I’m very comfortable saying that I’m part of the meat and potatoes.”

Read the entire article at Rutgers Magazine