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‘Burnt Orange Heresy’ Star Claes Bang Insists His Character Isn’t a ‘Psychopath’ (Video)

Director Giuseppe Capotondi says the film is ”pertinent to the times we’re living in“

| August 7, 2020 @ 2:17 PM

Claes Bang plays a man who does something highly inconceivable and goes off the rails because of his decisions in Giuseppe Capotondi’s drama, “The Burnt Orange Heresy.” But the actor doesn’t necessarily think his character is a “psychopath or maniac.”

“I don’t think he knows at the beginning of the film what’s going to happen three days later,” Bang told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. “I don’t think he’s a psychopath or maniac in that sense. It’s sort of what happens that drives him where he ends up going and I think that’s far more interesting… With this script, it was not so much down to me having to come up with stuff for this to be real — it was really shooting the scenes as they were written.”

In “The Burnt Orange Heresy,” Bang plays an art dealer who is hired to steal a painting from one of the biggest painters of all time. Soon, however, he is consumed by greed and he loses it. Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger and Donald Sutherland also star.

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“I think it’s pertinent to the times we’re living in,” Capotondi said when asked why he decided to adapt the book of the same name by Charles Willeford into a feature film. “Talking about power and abuse of power and truth, or, better, lies, and what it takes to turn a lie into truth.”

Without giving away too much, Bang’s character finds himself in deep trouble by the end of the film — and Bang recalls to what extremes the makeup department went to make him look like a man in despair.

Also Read: 'Jojo Rabbit' Director Taika Waititi Says He 'Felt Very Nervous' Playing Imaginary Hitler (Exclusive Video)

“He’s not really well in that scene, is he?” Bang said. “I remember I said to the makeup people, ‘He’s been inside smoking cigarettes for half a year writing the book so can we make him really pale?’ So they made me quite pale, and I said, ‘This is definitely not pale enough, let’s go for even more.’ I remember they put on grey instead of your skin color — they put grey all over my face. I was like, yeah, now we’re there. It works quite well, he looks f—ing terrible.”

Watch the video above.

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