IT HAS been billed as the Irish Goodfellas, but Martin Scorsese’s next gangster movie now looks like it will have no Irish actors in the main speaking parts.

Last week Scorsese dispensed with the services of Gerard McSorley, the Omagh-born actor who was to have played the role of a Boston police captain who doesn’t realise there’s a criminal mole in his department.

McSorley, whose credits include playing the gangster John Gilligan in Veronica Guerin, is expected to be replaced by Martin Sheen. The West Wing star can at least claim some Irish blood, given that his mother was born in Ireland. The rest of Scorsese’s cast is an all-American line-up with Jack Nicholson, Leonardo di Caprio, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg.

McSorley was dropped from the cast after four days of shooting in Brooklyn. He told the Irish Voice that he’d had “very interesting and very creative” conversations with Scorsese. He had also met with members of the Boston Police Department as part of his research.

He was given the bad news through his agent. “They didn’t put anything in writing and I can’t understand it,” McSorley told the Voice.

The actor thinks a heavy promotional tour for his film, Omagh, about the Real IRA bomb in 1998, may have affected his preparation for the Scorsese movie. “For Omagh, I had about two months, and for Veronica Guerin I had about three months, but here I was rushed over in a week to get my visa in Toronto, go to Boston on the train, come back and start filming,” he said.

McSorley had ideas that his “good guy” character could be based on a Northern Ireland police officer who became disillusioned during the Troubles and left for America in 1974.

The Irish actor said he’d been treated “spectacularly well” by Scorsese. “Scorsese is amazing, he lives for film, for art, and he is so literate. He knows his Joyce and Irish literature and it was a joy to talk to him,” he said.

Loosely based on the life of the notorious Boston-based Irish mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, The Departed stars Damon as an Irish-American gangster and DiCaprio as a cop who goes undercover in the Irish mafia.

This is familiar territory for Scorsese, who also teamed up with DiCaprio for the Irish gangster movie Gangs of New York. Unlike The Departed, it had several Irish actors in leading parts, including Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson and the Irish-based Daniel Day-Lewis.

Scorsese did hold two days of open casting calls in Yonkers and Queens last month in search of Irish-looking extras for the upcoming film. The demand was for “people to portray Irish wise guys, state troopers, police cadets, detectives, barflys and neighborhood types”. They would mainly be used in a funeral parlour scene and at a police graduation ceremony, while directors promised that speaking roles would be available to those with good Irish accents.

The castings were thronged, with members of the Irish community turning up with dyed red hair and pencilled-in freckles, but hundreds were turned away leading to angry protests.

Bulger, who is on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, disappeared in 1995 just before he was to be arrested on 18 counts of murder and for other crimes, including racketeering, extortion, narcotics distribution and money laundering in the Boston area.

The Departed is also a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs, which features a race between a criminal gang and a police department to find the mole within its ranks.

Scorsese’s remake will feature two police officers in south Boston. One, DiCaprio’s character, goes undercover in an Irish American gang, while the other, played by Damon, is a highway officer who becomes an agent for the same gang.

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