Over the past year especially, there’s been some talk of how Sienna Miller has made a serious career comeback, and she’s finally gotten legitimacy as an actress after her public persona took a major hit with her open affair with the still-married Balthazar Getty. While I think Sienna’s comeback is fine, I also think she’s probably in a more tenuous position than people believe. Sienna filmed a supporting role in Black Mass, the Whitey Bulger bio-pic starring Johnny “Scarfy” Depp. Sienna learned how to do an authentic Boston accent, she filmed extensive scenes last year and… now she’s been cut out of the film completely.

“Black Mass” director Scott Cooper confirmed that actress Sienna Miller has been cut from the film. In an interview this week with the Globe, Cooper said that Miller was “fantastic” opposite Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger’s girlfriend Catherine Greig, but that when it came time to edit, he had to narrow the scope of the story.

“It came down to narrative choices,” Cooper said.

Miller was spotted shooting scenes for “Black Mass” in Quincy last July. Last November, while on tour to promote her film “American Sniper,” she told the Globe that she had worked with a dialect coach to perfect her Boston accent for the local project. “Up until the day before I flew here, I couldn’t do it and it sounded stupid,” she said. “And I was sort of religiously watching every film ever set in South Boston: ‘Good Will Hunting,’ ‘Gone Baby Gone,’ ‘The Town.’ Catherine had a thick accent, so I hope I do it justice.”

Cooper explained that he decided to focus on Bulger’s life before he left Boston, and that the gangster’s years as a fugitive with Greig were “less dramatic.”

“Black Mass” has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, and will be released in theaters Sept. 18. Stars of the film will be in town Sept. 15 for a private screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

[From The Boston Globe]

Of course we could take this at face value, that it was just a narrative choice to focus on Whitey Bulger’s early years and that it has nothing to do with Sienna’s performance. But it does feel like there’s something else there, right? Am I hallucinating that? It feels like Sienna’s performance got wiped clean from the film because something more than “narrative choices.” It should be noted that no one else was cut from the film – Dakota Johnson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Julianne Nicholson, Juno Temple, Peter Sarsgaard, Joel Edgerton, Kevin Bacon and more are still featured in the film.

Photos courtesy of WENN.