Spotlight

When former Boston Globe investigative reporter Matt Carroll learned that Brian d’Arcy James ’90 would play him in the upcoming film Spotlight, the name didn’t ring a bell, so Carroll Googled him.

“Wow! Handsome guy!” he thought. On closer examination, Carroll realized “the guy who played Shrek on Broadway — the 8-foot tall green ogre with the funny ears — would play me, much to my kids’ delight.”

The feature film tracing the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé of the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (watch the trailer), due out in November, marks a major turn in James’ Broadway-dominated career.

Director Tom McCarthy, who selected James after “a great reading,” paid the actor the ultimate compliment. “Sometimes you need a certain star wattage to get a movie financed,” he says. “With Spotlight, we had the opportunity to cast whoever we thought was right. There were better-known actors vying for the role (indeed one called when James was about to audition), but Brian was the most right,” says McCarthy. “He’s the perfect role player and a joy to watch.”

“If this had been a Tom McCarthy movie about firefighters rescuing kittens,” James says, “I’d tell my agent, ‘I’m in.’ ” As Carroll, a core member of the Globe Spotlight team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative unit in the United States, James shares the marquee with Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and John Slattery. And it’s no accident the film is being released in November, just prior to prime awards season. “If Spotlight is a big hit and receives a lot of award attention, it will be an incredible accelerator of Brian’s career,” says manager and longtime Northwestern friend J.B. Roberts ’89.

While filming at the Globe, James knew he was on the right track in assuming Carroll’s identity when several of the reporter’s colleagues took one look at a mustachioed James, dressed in Carroll’s solid color shirt with eyeglasses hung from his neck. “They held their hands over their mouth and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s Matt.’ So I took that as a good sign.

“But it goes beyond the right glasses and shirt,” James insists. “The key is to capture what makes this person tick.”

For James and McCarthy, both Roman Catholics, there’s an emotional connection to the film’s tough subject. “Given my Catholic background — I went to Boston College,” says director McCarthy, “maybe I was the right person to tell this story, because there are two sides. This is not just a church-bashing film.”

For his part, James says, “It’s an opportunity to be part of a broad, difficult, important conversation as a Catholic. It forced me to get engaged in my own feelings of betrayal.” — R.H.